Try to support installation of specific versions of plugins

[buep]

For now we only support latest - let's try recommendation by @ndeloof in this comment #43 (comment)

[steven-foster]

would this support installing from http? we use some internally developed plugins that are not hosted in the update center (they wouldn't be useful to anybody)

our current bash/groovy configuration grabs the .hpi files and installs them directly

[ndeloof]

@steven-foster the goal here is to improve plugins and dependency management, so cherry-picking binaries from outside update center without metadata is out of scope imho.

[daniel-beck]

@ndeloof @steven-foster
The solution to that should probably involve being able to configure additional update sites, like UpdateSites Manager Plugin does. Coupled with something like Juseppe it's a clean solution using Jenkins builtin functionality.

[daniel-beck]

@ndeloof

cherry-picking binaries from outside update center without metadata is out of scope imho

Note that this will make this issue impossible to resolve, as update sites only advertise the latest release (compatible with the core version, more or less). (Unless you start consuming release-history.json and replace the advertised version number with one listed in there, hoping the URL is the same otherwise.)

[steven-foster]

Thanks for the Juseppe pointer, didn't come across this when looking at self-hosting plugins

[ndeloof]

@daniel-beck plugin management need indeed to be updated in many places.
http://updates.jenkins-ci.org/download/plugins/ let us download arbitrary plugin version but not metadata about them (some time ago @ydubreuil opened a PR to get them published as well for this exact same purpose)

[buep]

@steven-foster in case you don't get your plugin installation use-case to work, please make another issue for future work of maybe supporting your situation with self-made non-public plugins.
I know a few of our customers that have such as well, so it could be something to consider for future versions.

But it is out of scope on this issues.

[Cinderhaze]

Related to the above (hosting your own update sites), lets make sure this can still work in air-gapped environments!

[ewelinawilkosz]

@ndeloof I added 'Size' to help with planning and prediction
I follow https://www.praqma.com/stories/a-pragmatic-workflow/ where 'Size 4 - too big' simply means it takes more than a day (do you agree it does) - we can divide it to smaller <= 1 day issues if you think it makes sense

[ndeloof]

We could rely on UpdateCenter.InstallationJob to install plugin from a specific version, but UpdateSite unfortunately only expose a single version for each plugin (despite the download site has all of them, at least https://updates.jenkins.io/download/plugins/ does)

[ndeloof]

the sole option I have in mind is to assume update centers all use the download/plugins/shortname/version URL structure, so we can build plugin URL - but doing so we would miss the artifact checksum to check download was fine

[ewelinawilkosz]

@ndeloof I'm wondering what's your opinion about merging #43 - it would become part of first official release, but since you mentioned its Only inspirational so far I want to know if it makes sense

[ndeloof]

@ewelinawilkosz I've been working on my own version of it here : https://github.com/ndeloof/configuration-as-code-plugin/tree/plugins
which implement the proposed JEP-201 update (jenkinsci/jep#59)
please note this require jenkins-infra/update-center2#192

[ndeloof]

see #175

[ewelinawilkosz]

@ndeloof if I remember right current installation is not the final one, and we need to monitor jenkins-infra/update-center2#197
can we close this issue (after all we support the specific version install) and take necessary steps once the PR is merged in infra?

[ndeloof]

yes indeed, I think we can close this one and create a follow-up once we have an alternative to offer

[deiga]

@ndeloof Since the dependant issues seem solved, are there plans to continue this work?

[jetersen]

No, this feature was removed as of v1.8

[jetersen]

https://jenkins.io/projects/gsoc/2019/plugin-installation-manager-tool-cli/