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Last updated: 21 Jul 2022

govuk-puppet: Testing changes to Jenkins jobs

Our Jenkins jobs are configured in YAML (example).

If you ever need to test a change to the configuration of a Jenkins job, you could push your branch of govuk-puppet to GitHub, deploy it using the Deploy_Puppet Jenkins job, then wait half an hour for your changes to be applied. But this is an extremely slow feedback loop!

A much quicker way is to:

  1. SSH onto the Jenkins machine (gds govuk connect -e integration ssh jenkins)
  2. Disable Puppet on the machine (govuk_puppet --disable "Testing changes to a Jenkins job")
  3. Make your edits to the YAML on the machine, e.g. sudo vi /etc/jenkins_jobs/jobs/mirror_github_repositories.yaml
  4. Recompile all the jobs: /usr/local/bin/jenkins-jobs update --delete-old /etc/jenkins_jobs/jobs/

Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you have the right configuration. Then re-enable Puppet (govuk_puppet --enable) and run govuk_puppet --test to reset back to the original configuration.