Chroot-plugin

The aim of this jenkins plugin is to provide support for some chroot environment technologies. The first two environments to implement are pbuilder and mock. This way a jenkins job can use it's own isolated chroot environment, can install custom repositories and dependencies, and when the job is done, the chroot environment ist thrown away. This feature makes jenkins much more attractive as a build server for C and C++ projects.

Pbuilder works quite nice already. Mock is not useable at the moment.

Installation from Jenkins

Just install it like any other plugin: Chroot-plugin is available in the Jenkins Update Center. An extensive plugin documentation can be found in the Jenkins Wiki.

Installation from source

git clone https://github.com/rmohr/chroot-plugin
cd chroot-plugin
mvn install

You will find the resulting hpi file here:

./target/chroot.hpi

Using pbuilder

To allow jenkins to use pbuilder it is necessary to that the jenkins user can run /usr/sbin/pbuilder via sudo. Make sure to protect your jenkins installation properly, because pbuilder is NOT a secure and fully isolated environment.

An appropriate /etc/sudoers entry might look like this:

jenkins ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/pbuilder

Using the plugin

First Create chroot environments in Manage Jenkins > Chroot Environments:

Make sure that the autoinstall option is enabled.

A buildstep chroot builder is now available where you can select a preconfigured builder:

Future Plans

As the prove of concept phase is over, the next step is to clean the code and create a clean interface for long term stability.