Question

I have about 20 jobs using common parameters (user, password), and sometimes the password expires… So I have to change it on all jobs, which is really time consuming (and error prone, I may forget one).

I thought about:

• using a kind of magic property file if that exists to have directly lines like KEY, VALUE added into job parameters
• adding the same kind of KEY, VALUE pair directly inside build.xml, but where ? And it’s really ugly… Maybe with a dedicated XML embedded into the build.xml ?
• calling a slave job that would (how ?) push up to the parent one the desired values…

As you can see I’m only starting in Hudson/Jenkins (I’m using Jenkins 1.424.2.2), thanks for your help !

EDIT: I’m not admin of the Jenkins instance, so I cannot have access to global properties…

Answer 1

I eventually succeeded by:

• keeping encrypted credentials in a web page
• retrieving them in Hudson thanks to a shell script (wget), decrypt them, and creating a build.properties file in the workspace with lines name=value (in my case ssh.password=...)

This works, because Ant build steps detect this file and pass the variables inside into their context. Thanks to that I could centralize my credentials.