Jenkins jobs are part of the infrastructure and shall be considered as a code according to the paradigm of „Infrastructure as Code“. Jenkins allows to create build jobs with Groovy Job DSL. Jobs are no longer created manually through the graphical console, but code is written and checked in. The configuration of the jobs with the whole history can be seen in the version management. In this blog post I want to briefly show how this works in order to facilitate the entry .

A so-called seed job has to be created. If this job is built, a build job is generated from the the seed job which can be run to build the project as usual. Unfortunately, the build job is not automatically updated if the seed job is changed and rerun.

First you need the Job DSL Plugin. The plugin allows to describe build jobs in a Groovy script. Next, a freestyle project is created that will be the seed job. In the configuration you can leave everything empty. In the section Build click the Add build step and then select Process Job DSLs.

Then select Use the provided DSL script. The code for the job can directly typed in to the console as shown in the picture below. When selecting Look on Filesystem instead, you have the opportunity to load job DSL scripts from the workspace. This is the recommended option because the scripts can be checked in and managed in the version control.

Before the JDK and Mavenversion can be set in the DSL script, they must first be configured in the settings under Global Configuration Tools.