Backup configuration is one of the most important tasks associated with Jenkins server. You should always take regular backup of the Jenkins configuration, plugins, jobs and associated job configuration. In Jenkins, all the settings, build logs and archives of the artifacts are stored under the JENKINS_HOME directory. The easiest way is to just make a copy of the directory and whenever the same needs to be used, restore the contents from copy.

This directory information can be found from Manage Jenkins -> System information or going to http:///systemInfo page:

This should be set to C:\Program Files (x86)\Jenkins for windows servers and /var/lib/jenkins on linux distributions such as CentOS / Ubuntu by default.

The build jobs created under this directory contains all the details of each and every individual jobs configured in the Jenkins install:

Any job can be moved from one installation directory to another just by copying the jobs. Same goes for restoring jobs.

To make our process easier, we need to install plugins for backup from Manage Plugins section:

Again it will download any missing dependent plugins and let’s restart Jenkins once the plugins are installed. Once it’s done, you would see two new options enabled in the Manage Jenkins page:

Let’s first explore backup manager. Go to Backup Manager -> Setup and fill the details as below and save it:

For our backup purposes, we have created a directory at /jenkins_backups and using the same. It should be the absolute path on the server whether windows or linux and you should have already created it. Also make sure that you have assigned permissions to Jenkins service account using chown (in linux), for example: chown jenkins.jenkins /jenkins_backups/. Or the same goes for windows.

Then select backup hudson configuration from same plugin and it will backup the configuration for you. This is a backup at system level. For fine level backup or for schedule backups, we can use thin backup plugin. Let’s go to thin backup settings or http:///thinBackup/backupsettings page. Here, again we need to provide directory location to store backups and we can also specify schedule in cron job notation. However for our case, we’ll leave this empty for now and go with below settings:

Once done, let’s go ahead and try a sample backup and see if it works. There isn’t any progress you can see once you click on backup now. So after clicking it, hold for some time to see if the backup is completed or not. The most reliable option is to check the contents of the backup directory:

Restore option in the plugin is not of much use but since individual files are there, selective restore is possible.