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1. Overview

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to clone a Jenkins job. Cloning a job is useful when we want to reuse partially or totally its configuration. We’ll see various examples with different source trees.

2. Example Setup

We’ll start by creating a new job. In Jenkins’ left panel, let’s click on New Item:

 

jenkins1

The interface for item creation appears. We’ll fill in the Enter an item name text field with Initial Job and select the Freestyle project option:

 

initial job creation

Let’s now validate. The job configuration tab appears. For the sake of this tutorial, we can leave all the fields empty and click directly on the Save button. This will finish the creation of the job. We can now move back to Jenkins’ home page and we’ll see that our Initial Job is listed in the main panel:

 

job list after initial job creation

3. Copy the Job Into the Same Folder

Let’s now click again on New Item. This time, in Enter an item name we’ll put the name Copy Job. We’ll now scroll down until the Copy from section:

 

copy initial job

As we can see on the screenshot, we can take advantage of the auto-completion to select our Initial Job. We can now validate, and as we did before, directly click Save to complete the job’s creation. On Jenkins’ home page, we’ll now see the updated job list:

 

job list after copy job creation

4. Copy a Job Inside a Different Folder

As of now, we’ve only worked in Jenkins’ root directory. Let’s see how we can copy our job into other folders.

4.1. Using a Relative Path

First, let’s create a new folder in Jenkins. Once again, we’ll click on New Item. This time, we’ll choose the Folder option. Let’s call it Folder1:

folder1 creation

We can validate, and, as always, directly save it.

Let’s now come back to the home page. The folder Folder1 is now visible in the item list:

 

item list after folder1 creation

Let’s open Folder1. It’s empty:

 

empty folder1

We can click on the Create a job button. The item creation will appear once again. Let’s call our new job Copy Job In Folder1. As we’re creating a job this time, let’s remember to choose the Freestyle project option.

Let’s now scroll down to the Copy from field. Here, we’ll need to refer to the relative path of the Initial Job. It’s located in the parent directory, thus we’ll complete the field this way:

 

copy initial job in subfolder

Similarly to what we did in the previous sections, we can validate and finish the job’s creation. This leads us to the job’s page:

copy job's page

Let’s note the full project name: Folder1/Copy Job In Folder1, as we’ll use this information in the next section.

4.2. Using an Absolute Path

We’ll now go back to the home page and follow the steps to create a new folder once again. We’ll call this one Folder2, leading us to the following view from the home page:

 

 

item list after folder2 creation

Let’s open Folder2 and create a new job inside it. We’ll call this job Copy Job In Folder2. This time, we want to copy the Copy Job In Folder1. As we remember its full project name Folder1/Copy Job In Folder1, we can enter it in the Copy from field:

 

copy job with absolute path

We can now validate and we’re done!

5. Conclusion

In this article, we’ve discussed how to clone a Jenkins job. We’ve seen various ways to write the path of the source job.

Course – LS – All

Get started with Spring 5 and Spring Boot 2, through the Learn Spring course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE
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