Question

When viewing a project in Jenkins, I’d like to see the last console output displayed on the project page.

This satisfies two needs:

• I most often just want to see what the output of the build was; clicking through to the last console output seems needlessly cumbersome
• Non-technical management can’t remember how to / aren’t sufficiently motivated to click through to the last console output in cases where the output is relevant to them if only they were to easily see it

I’ve looked for plugins that support this but can’t find any.

What options do I have?

Answer 1

First an easy solution: job descriptions (push ‘edit description’ button on the main job page) admit HREF links. Make that link your latest build console permalink (http://[jenkins_server]/job/[job-name]/lastBuild/console).

If even one click is too much, here’s a possible solution: you can use log contents as the description of your job. You can update your job via Jenkins CLI with:

java -jar jenkins-cli.jar -s http://[jenkins-server] update-job [job-name] < config.xml

So what you need to do is this: after your jobs run, trigger another job that will take the triggering job and console output file as parameters, substitute <description> in the job’s config.xml with the contents of the console file (with proper escaping, etc.), and run the update command as above. Of course, this solution is labor-intensive and bug-prone.