Hello, I am new to Jenkins and I have been assigned the task to clean up Jenkins - specifically old Merge Requests (about 1000 of them). Jenkins is running on Ubuntu and my initial thought was to delete the merge folders from /var/lib/jenkins/job/, but that doesn’t seem to work. For testing I renamed one merge request to a different name, but it still shows up in the Jenkins portal albeit broken and renaming it back to original name does not fix it. Not sure if there is some dependencies somewhere that broke to when renamed the folder?
Deleting one Merge Request at a time from the portal is time consuming specially if there are thousands of then.
Is there a quicker way to delete these old Merge Request using a script running in Jenkins cli?
if you have a list of the jobs you can use the script console in Jenkins to delete them.
Deleting things from the file system is a bad idea usually. I would delete jobs this way only when Jenkins is not running. So at next startup the jobs will be gone.
As you say those are merge requests, do you use multibranch jobs here? If yes then you might want to check the settings of the corresponding parent job as closed merge requests (or pull requests in github) should be automatically deleted
Thank you for the feedback. Yes they are all multibranch jobs, the MRs are initiated in GitLab (if my wording makes sense). Didn’t think of checking the settings in our Gitlab configuration. That might help going forward.
You mentioned I can try deleting the jobs from filesystem while Jenkins is stopped. Haven’t tried that yet, maybe I will give that a shot first.