If you’re looking to script different aspects of Jenkins or simply prefer a command line version of Jenkins' dialogs, you have a few options:

Built-in CLI

All jenkins installations ship with a JAR file that allows you to run commands against the installation. The JAR works by SSH-ing to a special port exposed by the Jenkins server and runs commands against that SSH server.

Installation

You can download the jar file by running

wget http://YOUR_JENKINS_HOSTNAME/jnlpJars/jenkins-cli.jar
java -jar ./jenkins-cli.jar -s http://YOUR_JENKINS_HOSTNAME help
# use https if you have a certificate set up

Authentication

Before you start running commands, you need a way to authenticate to the Jenkins server. You can do this in two ways:

  1. One cool benefit of the SSH-based design is that you can use SSH keys to authenticate to the server. You can generate a key pair via ssh-keygen -t rsa && cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and copy the resulting public key into the SSH keys section at http://YOUR_JENKINS_HOSTNAME/user/YOUR_USERNAME/configure. If you use this approach, know that ssh-agent is not supported, meaning you need to either enter a passphrase constantly or skip having one.

  2. Supply your credentials via a local file to the command. You can generate an API token at http://YOUR_JENKINS_HOSTNAME/user/YOUR_USERNAME/configure using Show API Token. Then run

    $  echo 'YOUR_USERNAME:YOUR_API_TOKEN' > jenkins_secret
$ java -jar ./jenkins-cli.jar -s http://YOUR_JENKINS_HOSTNAME -auth @jenkins_secret who-am-i

Commands

  1. List jobs

    java -jar ./jenkins-cli.jar -s http://YOUR_JENKINS_HOSTNAME list-jobs

  2. Get job details returns job details in XML format

    java -jar ./jenkins-cli.jar -s http://YOUR_JENKINS_HOSTNAME get-job foo

  3. Create and update job take job details in XML format

    cat job.xml | java -jar ./jenkins-cli.jar -s http://YOUR_JENKINS_HOSTNAME create-job foo

Python API

You can use the python-jenkins package to do similar operations from Python. Internally, this uses a different mechanism - the REST API - to perform operations aganist the server. One advantage of this package is that it sometimes uses the friendlier JSON format instead of XML (though job creation, details still use XML).

Installation

$ pip install --user python-jenkins
$ python
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from jenkins import Jenkins
>>> help(Jenkins)

If you do not have pip, go here.

Authentication

Instead of directly using your password, the API token from http://YOUR_JENKINS_HOSTNAME/user/YOUR_USERNAME/configure using Show API Token is recommended.

$ python
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from jenkins import Jenkins
>>> j = Jenkins(url='http://YOUR_JENKINS_HOSTNAME', username='YOUR_USERNAME', password='YOUR_API_TOKEN')
>>> j.get_whoami()
>>> j.get_all_jobs()

Commands

Consult the full reference or use help within the Python shell.

Notes

It appears that the Python/REST API can be used to update/read Jenkins folders (folders are available via this plugin.

Sanketh I