Jenkins: Administration

Question 1

Best practices for disk space (Jenkins)

Answer 1

1. Offload artifacts, logs, backups, and other files to external storage such as Nexus or Artifactory so that they are not stored on the Jenkins controller.
2. Configure a separate disk on the controller just to hold backups. You can back up Jenkins files to a local director, then copy those files to an external location.
3. Big disks are recommended, although it is not necessary to invest in 15000rpm SCSI disks.
4. Low latency SSD drives can significantly enhance the performance of the Jenkins cluster.
5. Expandable volumes such as LVM on Linux or “spanned volumes” on Windows enable you to create very large virtual disks.
6. Disks can be network mounted using either NFS or SAN.
7. The Jenkins home directory ($JENKINS_HOME) should be its own filesystem.

Question 2

$JENKINS_HOME directory content

Answer 2

/var/lib/jenkins (default)

1. config.xml - general configuration file
2. jobs: build job workspace, history and artifacts
3. plugins - installed plugins
4. USERS - local user database