jenkins-script-console-scripts VS Packer

Groovy scripts for Jenkins administration

Based on other comments I recommend: - Committing your Jenkins config to a local git repo so you can see how an upgrade affects it with git diff - Capture you plugin versions with Jenkins version

You can do this by script console yourself and use the community docker image. Alternately, you can try out jenkins-bootstrap-shared project I made which pulls Jenkins into a JKD8 container (I plan to upgrade it to OpenJKD11 since Jenkins now supports that).

Delete builds for branches and tags after 120 days

If you're using the community Jenkins docker image you can generate your upgraded plugins.txt file with a script like this https://github.com/samrocketman/jenkins-script-console-scripts/blob/main/list-versions-for-issue-report.groovy

If you're an admin in Jenkins, then you cam retrieve the credentials via script console. I did a talk which discusses using the script console. You can run this script which exports most common credentials in Jenkins. It will render them as plain text which you may be able to use to log into vault.

Packer is a tool that can be used to build machine images. Basically, it takes a base image, runs a series of steps to provision that image, and then burns a new image. In my workplace we use it heavily to build AWS AMIs. But it has an ARM plugin that looks to be very very suitable for building customised Raspberry Pi images (my quick read of the doco there says it can go ahead and write the final image to an SD card for you too).

However, I was unable to build the boxes with packer for some reason. It turned out that this wasn't an easy to fix or obvious issue. In fact, I had to search quite hard to find an answer. I am pretty sure my friend Tim Hall (oracle-base) ran into this issue too. Finally, I found a description of the issue on packer GitHub: Packer 1.8.4 not working with Virtualbox 7.0.4+ #12118.

I was building a new version of YugabyteDB vagrant box with packer and virtual box. Because we (Yugabyte) have a new preview release out.

Packer. https://github.com/hashicorp/packer

For an AMI build pipeline, have a look at Hashicorp Packer and Ansible if a host is long lived

Heh, I've been messing more with Nomad & Packer than k8s for my own stuff, I'll say guilty for Ansible though it's useful on its own and with Packer.

Sounds reasonable. Personally, I just try to stay away from k8s until it becomes a requirement. Until then simplest tools are often a good choice for building systems that require less maintenance. That's a per-project decision though.

You do not need Ansible for VMs provisioning - you can bake a VM image that will pull repos and do other preparation stuff. HashiCorp Packer[1] is an good tool for this imo. This applies to bare metal, too, as you can bake ISO or IMG the same way. Stuff that differentiate those systems can be set up with cloud-init or something similar.

Regarding Ansible, it didn't changed much over the years. At least nothing really major like statefulness.

[1] https://www.packer.io/

Oooh, maybe I'll try it with packer or Foreman (or MaaS, I'm actually setting up MaaS atm...)