Due to changes in code signing certificates, we need to deploy a new build server combining our Jenkins install and our main product build pipeline (which is not done using Jenkins as it must be done in userspace). The problem is, that our current install is 1.624, do we need to upgrade to every release between it and the current LTS release for things to work correctly? Does anyone even know of someone that has an install this old (around 10 years now) that needs to upgrade?
You don’t need to upgrade to every release in between. You can try to directly jump to the latest LTS.
Most important: Take a backup of your JENKINS_HOME so you can always roll back.
My recommendation would be to set up a new instance in parallel that is on latest LTS. Install all the plugins you need (this is a good time to check which plugins might be obsolete) and then try to start creating a job on this new instance and see if everything is working as before.
I’ve testwise created a new instance from a 2.60.3 Jenkins and that seems to work without problems, but the jobs that are running are all very simple and are not doing any special things. Most have the pattern
- some parameters (only standard one, nothing fancy like active choices)
- checkout from git
- set some credential binding
- maybe use ssh-agent
- run a shell step that calls python
- send email in case of failure
- send a message to slack