As is good practise, I've got Jenkins set up at work to automatically build everything for continuous integration, pulling files from our Git repositories. On our development branches, builds get kicked off automatically whenever anyone commits a change. When we want to do formal testing, we pull the build from Jenkins and use that; and when we want to sign off a change request, we quote the Jenkins build number where the change went in. So far, so good.
The problem we have is that builds are a significant size. For our SDK, we have to build across multiple platforms so that we can check it works on all of them. At maybe 50MB per build, this starts to mount up! Short term I can keep asking IT to give me more storage space, but longer term I'd like a more strategic solution
The obvious answer in Jenkins is to set up deletion rules, whether deleting after some time or after some number of builds. The problem then though is that if we delete that older development build, we lose the traceability of what we tested. I'm sure most engineers at one time or another have had to do a binary chop through older builds to find an obscure bug/regression which was only spotted some time later. For me, it is unacceptable to lose that history.
The important feature of build history though is not the binary build artifacts, but the build log recording what Git commits (or anything else; toolchain versions for example) went into each build. That's what lets us go back to investigate older builds and recreate them if required. The build log is relatively small (and highly compressible, being a text file). We do still need to keep build artifacts for recent builds though, so that testers can use them. So I'm thinking a better alternative would be to preserve the build log in Jenkins for all builds, but to have Jenkins automatically delete build artifacts after some time.
Does anyone know of a way in Jenkins (perhaps a plugin?) which would let us automatically delete/archive build artifacts from older builds, but still keep the build details and log for those builds? I'm happy to do a Jenkins upgrade if necessary to get this feature. And of course this needs to be only for selected development build jobs - all release build jobs need their build artifacts to be preserved forever, as do any builds which have the "keep forever" button ticked.
If it's absolutely necessary, I could set up a separate cron job to do this on the Jenkins file area. That's a nasty hack though, and I suspect it's likely to cause some issues with Jenkins, so I'd rather not do something that brute-force if there's a better alternative.
