git + branch as configuration source

[ewelinawilkosz]

we now support folder as a configuration source, what I'm missing is git repository + branch as a location. it would allow e.g. multiple teams to share common configuration and maintain instance specific on a branch. so plugin would take two args - repo & branch and read yaml from repo root folder

any opinions?

[jonbrohauge]

So you say that JCasC should download one or more Jenkins configuration yaml-files from the repository, or should it read the yaml as a stream, i.e. opening up for the possibility of having a Consul-like service that gives you a yaml-based response?

[ewelinawilkosz]

I'm just saying I want to have a possibility to have multiple jenkins instances configured with files stored in one repo, where each branch represents different jenkins. that way we can maintain common configuration on e.g. master, and instance specific in files added on branches. if there is a change on master you merge to your branch and get changes in let's say jenkins_common.yaml but your instance specific yamls are not touched.

how we do it is to be decided - do you have preferred solution?

[jonbrohauge]

Cool, I like that. Just wondering.

A possible long term goal could be when a change has been detected on the branch that your Jenkins instance is watching, it'll do a reload. Thinking of a push-trigger from your git repository.

[ewelinawilkosz]

definitely, but I would also like to allow users to configure jcasc behavior - do they want autoreload or do they want to control it (we have an issue for that #274)
anyway, as you say, long term probably - we'll try to include it in 1.0 but no promises

[Mathiasdm]

It would be nice to have this in a version-control independent manner, to support for example Mercurial.

[x10an14]

@ewelinawilkosz I very much like this idea =)

I'm just saying I want to have a possibility to have multiple jenkins instances configured with files stored in one repo, where each branch represents different jenkins. that way we can maintain common configuration on e.g. master, and instance specific in files added on branches. if there is a change on master you merge to your branch and get changes in let's say jenkins_common.yaml but your instance specific yamls are not touched.

Makes it easier for a platform/sysadmin -team to maintain a "dev" branch of Jenkins yaml file(s), whilst the "production" Jenkins instances refer to the master branch by default =D

Would it be possible to make this git-host agnostic too? My impression is that currently in 0.10-alpha, most, if not all Git-config is relying on you to use Github specifically.
(We're running Bitbucket unfortunately).