Jenkins Plugin: create a new job programmatically

Question

How to create a new Jenkins job within a plugin?

I have a Jenkins plugin that listens to a message queue and, when a message arrives, fires a new event to create a new job (or start a run).

I'm looking for something like:

Job myJob = new Job(...);

I know I can use REST API or CLI but since I'm in the plugin I'd use java internal solution.

Answer 1

You can create a new hudson/jenkins job by simply doing:

FreeStyleProject proj = Hudson.getInstance().createProject(FreeStyleProject.class, NAMEOFJOB);

If you want to be able to handle updates (and you already have the config.xml):

import hudson.model.AbstractItem
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource
import jenkins.model.Jenkins

final jenkins = Jenkins.getInstance()

final itemName = 'name-of-job-to-be-created-or-updated'
final configXml = new FileInputStream('/path/to/config.xml')
final item = jenkins.getItemByFullName(itemName, AbstractItem.class)

if (item != null) {
  item.updateByXml(new StreamSource(configXml))
} else {
  jenkins.createProjectFromXML(itemName, configXml)
}

Make sure though you have the core .jar file before doing this though.

Answer 2

Use Job DSL Plugin.

From the plugin page:

Jenkins is a wonderful system for managing builds, and people love using its UI to configure jobs. Unfortunately, as the number of jobs grows, maintaining them becomes tedious, and the paradigm of using a UI falls apart. Additionally, the common pattern in this situation is to copy jobs to create new ones, these "children" have a habit of diverging from their original "template" and consequently it becomes difficult to maintain consistency between these jobs.

The Jenkins job-dsl-plugin attempts to solve this problem by allowing jobs to be defined with the absolute minimum necessary in a programmatic form, with the help of templates that are synced with the generated jobs. The goal is for your project to be able to define all the jobs they want to be related to their project, declaring their intent for the jobs, leaving the common stuff up to a template that were defined earlier or hidden behind the DSL.