The jenkins wargemmer consists of two parts: a Rake task for turning a jenkins war file (__W.__eb A. __R.__chive for those not familiar with java lingo) into a distributable rubygem, and a cron task for creating a new version of the gem, whenever a new jenkins version comes out.
The script polls the jenkins update center and checks to see if there is a newer version of the jenkins distribution that has not yet been gemmed up and if not, then bundles it and pushes it to rubygems.org as a gem named jenkins-war.
The generated gem has the same version number as the jenkins distribution itself. So if you want the 1.386 distribution, then you would do a
gem install jenkins-war --version 1.386
In addition to the war file long with the The jenkins-war gem comes with an executable script jenkins.war
to help you leverage your jenkins distribution.
Without any arguments, it returns the location of the jenkins warfile itself:
$ jenkins.war location
/Users/cowboyd/.rvm/gems/[email protected]/gems/jenkins-war-1.391/lib/jenkins/jenkins.war
It can unpack itself to a given directory. This is useful if you want to extract certain assets such as classfiles, annotations, configurations from it.
$ jenkins.war unpack /tmp/jenkins.war.exploded
It can copy itself anywhere
$ jenkins.war cp tmp
copied /Users/cowboyd/.rvm/gems/[email protected]/gems/jenkins-war-1.391/lib/jenkins/jenkins.war -> tmp
Or if you want the classpath:
$ jenkins.war classpath
/Users/cowboyd/.jenkins/wars/1.391/WEB-INF/lib/jenkins-core-1.391.jar
You can even run a test server with your shiny jenkins war file.
$ jenkins.war server
All of these functions can be accessed from ruby code via the Jenkins::War
module.