Jenkins : JenkinsLint Plugin

Plugin Information

View JenkinsLint on the plugin site for more information.

Detects whether your Jenkins configuration follows those best practices 

This plugin has mainly two goals:

  • To make it easier to detect issues in your Jenkins configuration that will cause Jenkins to blow up when you attempt to run those jobs.
  • To encourage discussion within the Jenkins community on the more subjective stuff. Having a set of checks to base discussion on helps drive out what we as a community think is good style.
   

Summary

Jenkins is an awesome Automation System, and there are a bunch of people using it in different ways, for example: developers, testers, automation, build engineers, release engineers, scrum master, product owner and so on. Unfortunately, as the number of jobs grows, maintaining them becomes tedious, and the paradigm of using a predefined set of best practices falls apart.

The Jenkins Lint plugin attempts to solve this problem by allowing jobs to be evaluated with some predefined best practices. The goal is for your team to be able to define those best practices to be related to their project.

Manually reviewing those jobs wouldn't be too hard, but doing the same thing all over again for every new job or for a hundred other projects is where it gets difficult and tedious. This provides a much more powerful way of analyzing them.

Usage

You can find it under <jenkins_url>/jenkinslint or reach it via links in the sidepanel of the main page. You don't need to do anything else, just click on the Jenkins Lint link and those Lint checkers will be shown.



 

Features

List of available Job checks:

  • Artifact Publisher check
  • BFA check
  • Built Timeout check
  • CleanUp Workspace check
  • Git Ref repo check
  • Git Ref Submodule repo check
  • Git Shallow clone check
  • Gradle Wrapper check
  • Groovy system exit check
  • Hard-coded Script check
  • Javadoc Publisher check
  • Job Assigned Label check
  • Master Assigned Label check
  • Job Description check
  • Job Log Rotator check
  • Job Name check
  • Maven Job Type check
  • Multibranch Job Type check
  • Null SCM check
  • Polling SCM Trigger check
  • TimerTrigger Hash check

List of available Slave checks:

  • Slave description check
  • Slave label check
  • Slave version check
  • Windows slave launch check

Planned upcoming features

  • Configure Checks (change severity)
  • Load checks dynamically via Jenkins.
  • Load checks dynamically via Reflection. 
  • Define some kind of programmatically scripts.
  • Check: Cyclomatic complexity check
  • Support Declarative pipeline and shared Libraries

Controlling checks:

You can ignore a particular check  in a specific job, by adding a trailing lint:ignore:<check name> comment to the job description.

You can ignore a check globally, by deselecting it in the system configuration: "Manage Jenkins" / "Configure System" in the "Advanced" section below "Jenkins Lint".

Disabling the healthy floating box in the Job Summary Page

You can disable the healthy floating box in the Job Summary Page, by unchecking "Enable JobAction" in the system configuration 

Features controlled by system properties

Based on the Features controlled by system properties, you can disable the healthy floating box in the Job Summary Page

Property

Default

Version

Notes

org.jenkins.ci.plugins.jenkinslint.JobLintAction.disabled

false

0.9.0

Deprecated since 0.10.0. Removed since 0.12.0.


By default you will see the below view:

 

If you disabled then:

Global settings

You can easily disable/enable Checkers and customise them from the Global Settings <jenkins_url>/configure section "Jenkins Lint"  

 

Enable/Disable with Groovy script

You can also configure your lint checkers using the Script console, from version 0.10.0 onwards!

import org.jenkins.ci.plugins.jenkinslint.JenkinsLintGlobalConfiguration
import jenkins.model.GlobalConfiguration

// Disable Globally
JenkinsLintGlobalConfiguration.all().get(JenkinsLintGlobalConfiguration.class).setGlobalEnabled(false)

// Disable JobAction
JenkinsLintGlobalConfiguration.all().get(JenkinsLintGlobalConfiguration.class).setJobActionEnabled(false)

// Disable Lint
JenkinsLintGlobalConfiguration.all().get(JenkinsLintGlobalConfiguration.class).setCleanupWorkspaceCheckerEnabled(false)
 
// More properties in the JenkinsLintGlobalConfiguration class: https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkinslint-plugin/blob/a97f3e17b14d7410164bb4bea50ba5968a3a97b8/src/main/java/org/jenkins/ci/plugins/jenkinslint/JenkinsLintGlobalConfiguration.java#L18-L45

API

You can retrieve jenkins lint defects by requesting the following URLs :

  • <jenkins/hudson_url>/jenkinslint/api/json?depth=2&pretty=true
  • <jenkins/hudson_url>/jenkinslint/api/xml?depth=2


And also you can retrieve lint defects per job/agents:

  • <jenkins/hudson_url>/job/<your_job>/jenkinslint/api/json?depth=2&pretty=true
  • <jenkins/hudson_url>/job/<your_job>/jenkinslint/api/xml?depth=2
  • <jenkins/hudson_url>/computer/<agent>/jenkinslint//api/json?depth=2&pretty=true
  • <jenkins/hudson_url>/computer/<agent>/jenkinslint//api/xml?depth=2

Workaround

 

There is already a known issue in the initial version 0.1.0Workspace Cleanup Plugin is a required dependency otherwise JenkinsLint will fail when analyzing those Jobs

Console Output
Jul 13, 2015 10:21:06 PM hudson.ExpressionFactory2$JexlExpression evaluate
WARNING: Caught exception evaluating: it.data in /jenkinslint/. Reason: java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
        at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:483)

.... Giant Stacktrack ....

        at winstone.BoundedExecutorService$1.run(BoundedExecutorService.java:77)
        at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1142)
        at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:617)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)
Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: hudson/plugins/ws_cleanup/WsCleanup$DescriptorImpl
        at org.jenkins.ci.plugins.jenkinslint.check.CleanupWorkspaceChecker.executeCheck(CleanupWorkspaceChecker.java:22
)
        at org.jenkins.ci.plugins.jenkinslint.JenkinsLintAction.getData(JenkinsLintAction.java:60)
        ... 112 more

There are two workarounds:

  1. Installing  Workspace Cleanup Plugin 
  2. Upgrading the JenkinsLint version

Requirements

Jenkins

Jenkins version:

  • 1.607 or newer if Jenkins pipelines are installed
  • 1.580 or newer is required if jenkins pipelines are not installed

It might work with previous versions.

NOTE: Jenkins version is required when testing those checkers using the mvn test command. This plugin uses java reflection to get rid of those plugins/jenkins version dependencies although it's required in the test phase when developing it to verify/test those checkers.

Open Issues

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Version history

Planning 

(plus) Check: Cyclomatic complexity check (issue #42269)

Version 0.14.0 (August 29, 2017)

  • (plus)  Enable/Disable whether to analyse disabled jobs from Global Settings (issue #46395)

Version 0.13.0 (August 24, 2017)

  • (plus) Show graphs. (issue #46350)
  • (warning) Fixed NPE when using MultijobProjects (issue #46424
  • (warning) Fixed ClassCastException when using a misconfigured restrict where to run field (issue #46383)

Version 0.12.0 (August 15, 2017) 

  • (plus) Check: Detect ignored groovy sandbox in Projects. (issue #46177 )
  • (plus) Check: Detect ignored groovy sandbox in Pipelines. (issue #46162)
  • (plus) Customise HardcodedScript lint to enable/disable comments as lines. (issue #46146)
  • (plus) Fully support of Pipeline linting. (issue #46162)
  • (plus) Search box. (issue #42359)
  • (info) Bumped minimal Jenkins Core version to 1.607 (issue #46162)
  • (info) Remove: Deprecated System Property (Features controlled by system properties) . (issue #46164)
  • (info) Fixed Column Ordering based on Check Status and Job/Slave Name (issue #46033)
  • (warning) Fixed Linting with multi-configuration projects. (issue #46176)

Version 0.11.0 (August 10, 2017)

  • (plus) Check: Groovy system exit check in Input Parameters  (issue #45961)
  • (plus) Check: Groovy system exit check in Publishers  (issue #45960)
  • (plus) Check: Run Timeout Check in Build Steps (issue #45938)
  • (info) Fixed Hardcoded Script check with empty lines (issue #46035)
  • (info) Fixed Column Ordering based on Check Status and Job Name (issue #46033)

Version 0.10.1  (August 1, 2017)

  • (warning)  Fixed false positive with Timer Trigger Checker (issue #45879)

Version 0.10.0  (August 1, 2017)

  • (plus)  Check: Git Ref Submodule Check  (issue #41528)
  • (plus)  Enable/Disable Checks globally/individually from Global Settings (issue #45882)
  • (plus)  Hardcoded Script Threshold value is now part of the Global Settings (issue #45882)

Version 0.9.0 (July 27, 2017)

  • (plus) JobAction View (Controlled by System Property) (PR #17)
  • (plus) AgentAction View (PR #17)
  • (plus) RestAPI for the JobAction and AgentAction
  • (info) Jenkinsfile integration with ci.jenkins.io (PR #18)
  • (info) Fixed Jelly and XSS prevention
  • (info) Bumped minimal Jenkins Core version to 1.580

Version 0.8.0 (Mar 7, 2017)

Version 0.7.0 (Feb 26, 2017)

  • (warning)  Maven and Matrix projects weren't supported when linting some defects  (issue #42310)
  • (info)  i18 support

Version 0.6.0 (Feb 12, 2017)

Version 0.5.0 (Oct 1, 2015)

Version 0.4.0 (Aug 27, 2015)

  • (info) Support Jenkins lint check for Jenkins Slaves (issue #30161)

Version 0.3.0 (Jul 29, 2015)

Version 0.2.0 (Jul 21, 2015)

Version 0.1.2 (Jul 15, 2015)

  • (error)  Some builders cannot be cast to hudson.tasks.CommandInterpreter (issue #29427)
  • (info)  HardcodedScript Check supports MatrixProjects (issue #29444)
  • (info)  Create unit test suite for UI

Version 0.1.1 (Jul 14, 2015)

  • (error) Project dependency with ws-cleanup plugin (issue #29418)
  • (plus) Check: Hardcoded Script check

Version 0.1.0 (Jul 12, 2015)

  • (info)   Initial release