Run Jenkins build for whichever branch was checked into on Gitlab

Question

I recently made the transition from Subversion to Git for all my repos at work. However, with svn we had commit hooks in place so that our Jenkins job would run for whichever branch was checked into. Now, I'm trying to set this up using Gitlab and there appears to only be one place to add a web hook. It looks like any time something is checked into ANY branch, the web hook will run. Meaning if I have a branch_A associated with jenkins_job_A, something could be checked into branch_B and the commit hook for jenkins_job_A will still run. Is there a branch by branch way to configure these web hooks? Or is there some kind of script I can check into each branch that will act as a commit hook? Or (my fear) is this feature not supported in Gitlab?

Answer 1

I guess you set up GitLab to do a post commit request to http://yourserver/jenkins/git/notifyCommit?url=<URL of the Git repository> ? In theory this should trigger the polling on all jobs that are configured with that URL, and in the polling step the jobs should decide whether they should build or not. In practice this will unfortunately cause all jobs to fire.

We worked around this issue by moving the Job configuration into a Jenkinsfile and then use a Multibranch Pipeline .

As an alternative you could also install the GitLab plugin for Jenkins and use the Jenkins integration in GitLab . This will allow you to trigger the correct jobs when commits are pushed on a branch. The downside is that it requires a per-job configuration.