JobConfigHistory Plugin

Saves copies of all job and system configurations.

Plugin Information

Plugin ID	jobConfigHistory	Changes	In Latest Release Since Latest Release
Latest Release Latest Release Date Required Core Dependencies	2.11 (archives) Apr 17, 2015 1.554.1 maven-plugin (version:2.0)	Source Code Issue Tracking Pull Requests Maintainer(s)	GitHub Open Issues Pull Requests Stefan Brausch (id: stefanbrausch) Mirko Friedenhagen (id: mfriedenhagen) Kathi Stutz (id: kstutz) Yordan Boev (id: boev)
Usage		Installations	2014-May 8299 2014-Jun 8628 2014-Jul 9151 2014-Aug 9371 2014-Sep 9821 2014-Oct 10333 2014-Nov 10546 2014-Dec 10757 2015-Jan 11377 2015-Feb 11718 2015-Mar 12409 2015-Apr 12560

This plugin saves a copy of the configuration file of a job (config.xml) for every change made and of the system configuration (not activated by default). You can also see what changes have been made by which user if you configured a security policy.

The plugin also provides an overview page of all changes. You can find it under <jenkins_url>/jobConfigHistory or reach it via links in the sidepanel of the main and the system configuration pages. The overview page lists at first only changes made to the system configuration (for performance reasons), but there are links to view either all job configuration histories or just the deleted jobs or all kinds of configuration history entries together (which may take some time to load, depending on the number of jobs in your instance).

It is also possible to get a side-by-side view of the differences between two configurations and to restore an old version of a job's configuration. (The latter is only available for jobs, not for system changes.) However, if you restore an older version of the config file and the new version contains fields that were not present in the older version, the restored version will still contain these fields, although they were not present in the original.

With the 1.x versions of this plugin, the job configuration history data used to be stored with each job (JENKINS_HOME/jobs/JOBNAME/config-history), whereas the system configuration history was stored in an extra directory under JENKINS_HOME. As of version 2.0, both types of configuration history data are now to be found in one directory under JENKINS_HOME. The default location for this folder is JENKINS_HOME/config-history.
Now there are two possible scenarios:
If you did not use the default root history directory of the 1.x version, but set it to an individual path on the Jenkins configuration page, the 2.x versions of the plugin should still be able to find and display the data correctly.
However, if you did not change the path and used the default root history directory, your job configuration data is stored with each job, where the 2.x versions of the plugin will not find it any longer. If you want the plugin to list the job configuration history again, you have to move the data manually from JENKINS_HOME/jobs/JOBNAME/config-history to JENKINS_HOME/config-history/jobs/JOBNAME.
This can be done with a script like the following:

#!/bin/bash -e

src=/var/lib/jenkins/jobs
target=/var/lib/jenkins/config-history/jobs

cd "$src"
# Make sure we support jobs containing space in names
dirs=( * )
for f in "${dirs[@]}"
do
        mv "$f/config-history" "$target/$f" || true
done

If you use this plugin together with the Global Build Stats Plugin you should add global-build-stats to the excludes in the System configuration exclude file pattern section of this plugin in Configure System page. Fixed in version 1.9 of the plugin.

Open issues

Changelog

Version 2.11 (April 17 2015)

Avoid calling User.current() during Jenkins initialization (Thanks to Thomas de Grenier de Latour)
Avoid tracking changes for cloud slave as well (Thanks to Ryan Campbel)

Version 2.10 (November 12 2014)

Fix proposal for NPE in ComputerHistoryListener.onConfigurationChange method (Thanks to William Bernardet)
(issue #22639) Don't record changes to AbstractCloudSlaves or Ephemeral Nodes (Thanks to Ryan Campbell and Jesse Click)

Version 2.9 (September 02 2014)

Fixed: Do not save config for matrix configurations (issue #24412) (Thanks to Oliver Gondža)
Fixed: Job config change not saved for maven and matrix projects (issue #24410) (Thanks to Oliver Gondža)

Version 2.8 (July 17 2014)

Default for global configuration "saveModuleConfiguration" changed to false
Fixed history could not saved for some job types if in the system configuration "Save folder configuration changes" wasn't set (Thanks to Jesse Glick)
Rely on Jenkins 1.548+ so we can use TransientActionFactory (Thanks to Jesse Glick)
Added Rest Api (issue #22796) (issue #22895) (issue #22937) (Thanks to cfs pure))
Fixed Building plugin in Windows environment (Testing only) (Thanks to Oleg Nenashev)
Fixed wrong user link in diff page
Fixed: Suppress the targetType loading issue (issue #20511) (Thanks to Oleg Nenashev)

Version 2.7 (Release failed)

Version 2.6 (Apr 14 2014)

Diff view: easily review changes sequentially (Next/Previous links) (issue #21411)
Show Config Versions in Diff View (issue #21406)
Add config history for slaves too (Thanks to Lucie Votypkova)
Folder integration (issue #20990) (Thanks to Jesse Glick)

Version 2.5 (Oct 31 2013)

Add button for restoring deleted projects
Add view that only contains 'Created' entries
Change purging (by quantity as well as by age) so that 'Created' entries of a project are not deleted
Fix links so that last existing config file of a deleted job is shown (instead of an error)
Always save system changes. (Remove configuration option for it.)
Fix for 'Change History consumes extreme amounts of CPU' (issue #17124) (Thanks to Stephan Pauxberger)
Lazy loading bug fixed. (Thanks to Jesse Glick)

Version 2.4 (Apr 25 2013)

Make build badges optional (Improvement issue #16793)
Fix link to wrong config version in build badges (issue #17119)
Add traditional Chinese translations (Thanks to tan9!)
Fix showDiffs bug that does not show all changes to the configuration file (issue #17124)
Make saving of Maven module config files optional (issue #16471)
Fix sort order that was changed by a Jenkins core bug fix for issue #17039

Version 2.3 (Feb 25 2013)

Add option to automatically delete configuration histories based on their age (Feature request issue #12233).
Fix bug that throws NPE when building a new project (issue #16496).
Set "skip duplicate history" enabled by default (issue #14303).

Version 2.2 (Jan 30 2013)

Catch NPE which appears when copying recently created job (Workaround for issue #16499).

Version 2.1.1 (Jan 22 2013)

Fix bug that prevents building a job which has no config history entries.

Version 2.1 (Jan 18 2013)

Add badges which appear in the build history when the configuration of the respective job has changed since it was build the last time.
Change the URL parameters so that not entire paths but just timestamps and job/system configuration names are passed (Fix for issue #16375).

Version 2.0 (Nov 19 2012)

Save and list config info for deleted jobs (Fix for issue #13069)
Add button for restoring a previous job configuration (Fix for issue #9616)
Improve loading time of global jobConfigHistory page
Change access control so that system changes can only be viewed by users with system configure permission

Add support for hierachical job model (ItemGroup) (Thanks to ndeloof)

Warning
With this version the plugin changes the location where the configuration history data is stored. This means that some data might not be found by the plugin any longer and has to be moved manually. See above for more information.

Version 1.13 (Jan 31 2012)

Fix for issue #12596: Make plug-in compatible with LTS version.

Version 1.12 (Nov 18 2011)

Side-by-Side difference view (pull request 2).

Version 1.11 (May 08 2011)

pom.xml now references correct github repository.

Version 1.10 (May 08 2011)

Include japanese translation provided by tyuki39.
Update to maven3 and newest plugin parent (1.409)
Fix for issue #9617: Include an easy way to see the last diff.

Version 1.9 (Dec 20 2010)

Workaround for issue #6774, issue #6943 provided by John Borghi: http 500 error thrown whilst saving a job configuration although the changes are actually persisted, Save config results in IOException: Unable to delete....config.xml when "Do not save duplicate history" is selected, mostly a Windows/NFS problem.
Fix for issue #6924: Add global-build-stats to DEFAULT_EXCLUDE in JobConfigHistoryConsts.java.
Added Spanish translation (release #33152)

Version 1.5 (May 31 2010)

Fix for issue #6655: JDK 1.5 compatibility. (Thanks to vlatombe)
Bugfix in exception handling

Version 1.4 (May 11 2010)

Fix for issue #5864: Plugin requires admin rights.
Provide the following additional features. The configurations are optional and can be set via the "Manage Hudson"->"Configure System" link. (Many thanks to John Borghi and his team for this enhancement)
- Alternative root folder for storing history. This option must be used if interested in preserving configurations for deleted jobs.
- Setting for the maximum number of history configurations to keep (per item). Leave blank or zero to keep all entries (no maximum).
- Option to not create a new history entry if it is the same as the last saved entry for that item.
- Allow saving of 'system' configurations - defined as those stored directly in HUDSON_ROOT.
- Regexp pattern for excluding system configuration files to save. Useful because some system configurations are not interesting to save. A recommended default value is provided.
- Enhanced UI for selecting versions to compare.
- Allow system configuration diffs to be viewed via the UI.

Version 1.3 (Apr 05 2010)

Fix for issue #6163: Job Config History badge is lost with newer versions of hudson.

Version 1.2 (Feb 12 2010)

Replaced the homegrown version of diff with gnu unified diff.
Fix for issue #5534: Access permissions are not taken into account when getting files via jobConfigHistory.
Fix for issue #5607: table entry for username was empty.

Version 1.1 (Feb 01 2010)

First version of this plugin as described in issue #2765.