Talking To Jenkins From Campfire With Hubot

Jan 6, 2012 · 2 minute read

In what turned out to be a productive holiday hacking with languages I’d not used before, I got round to writing some coffeescript on node.js. This was more to do with scratching a personal itch that pure experimentation. I had a play with Janky (Github’s Jenkins/Hubot mashup) but found it a little opinionated on the Jenkins side, but the campfire integration is excellent. Looking at the Jenkins commands in hubot-scripts though I found those even more opinionated.

The magic of open source though is you can just fix things, then ask nice people if they like what you’ve done. I set about writing a few more general commands and lo, the’ve been quickly merged upstream.

These add:

• A command to list all your Jenkins jobs and the current state
• A command to trigger a normal build
• A command to trigger a build with a list of parameters

This was made much easier by first looking at the previous Jenkins commands, and then looking at other scripts in the hubot-scripts repository. The best way of learning a new language/framework is still on the shoulders of others.

I’ve got a few other good ideas for Jenkins related commands. I want to add a filter command to the jobs list, both by name and by current state. For longer running jobs I also want to report whether a build is currently running. And then maybe get information about a specific job, like the last few runs or similar. Any other requests or ideas most welcome.