I do a lot of testing in my Jenkins VM which I have on my local laptop. I found this time-consuming to remove Jenkins and installing again from scratch. It would be better if I have a simple way to restore my Jenkins.
Is there a way to remove all the plugins that I have installed manually and keep the plugins that were installed during Jenkins installation?
One could also use docker Jenkins LTS. If one wants to start from scratch, just remove the mounted Jenkins home folder and there will be a clean Jenkins in no time.
One could use ansible geerlingguy.jenkins role. When this role is applied, a Jenkins system will be created without any plugins. Subsequently, one could install plugins manually, but also define them in ansible, i.e. plugins as code.
One possible approach, although a bit tedious (and a bit dumb), would be to:
I find it strange that nobody mentioned the Configuration as Code plugin. Our solution to this problem is to maintain a base Docker image for jenkins, provisioned with two config files:
The plugins are installed by the install-plugins.sh script provided by the base Jenkins image:
COPY casc_configs/plugins.txt /usr/share/jenkins/ref/plugins.txt
COPY casc_configs/jenkins.yml /usr/share/jenkins/ref/jenkins.yml
RUN /usr/local/bin/install-plugins.sh < /usr/share/jenkins/ref/plugins.txt
and Jenkins itself is configured using the jenkins.yml.
The plugin file is generated from a template:
{% for plugin in jenkins.plugins %}
{{ plugin.name }}:{{ plugin.version }}
{%endfor%}
where the variable jenkins.plugins is a big list of dicts:
jenkins:
plugins:
- name: configuration-as-code
version: 1.14
Doing things this way makes it possible to create and destroy fully configured jenkins instances on the fly. If you want, you can keep the jenkins.yml and plugins.txt on a mount that Jenkins can read when it starts.
