Developers and DevOps professionals frequently use Jenkins as a tool for automating tasks. However, like any software, it is essential to maintain it well for smooth operation. Unfortunately, people often overlook the maintenance of the Jenkins home directory, which can become cluttered and full over time. Therefore, in this post, we will examine how to clean up the Jenkins home directory when it becomes full.
Symptoms of a Full Jenkins Home Directory
If the Jenkins home directory is full, you may notice some performance issues or error messages. For example, builds may take longer to complete, or you may see error messages related to insufficient disk space. It’s important to address these issues as soon as possible, as a full Jenkins home directory can lead to more serious problems down the line.
Causes of a Full Jenkins Home Directory
There are a few common causes of a full Jenkins home directory. One is old builds and logs taking up space. As you run builds, Jenkins stores the build artifacts and logs in the home directory. If you don’t regularly delete old builds and logs, they can add up and take up a lot of space.
Storing large artifacts in the wrong location is another cause of a full Jenkins home directory. By default, Jenkins stores all artifacts in the jobs/<job_name>/builds directory within the home directory. If you have large artifacts or build outputs that don’t belong in this location, moving them to a different location can free up space in the home directory.
Cleaning Up the Jenkins Home Directory
If you’ve determined that your Jenkins home directory is full, there are a few steps you can take to clean it up:
- Remove old builds and logs: You can use Jenkins’ built-in “Discard Old Builds” feature to delete old builds and logs. To access this feature, go to the “Configure” page for a job and scroll down to the “Build Triggers” section.
- Move large artifacts to a different location: If you have large artifacts that don’t need to be stored in the
jobs/<job_name>/buildsdirectory, you can move them to a different location. To move large artifacts to a different location, specify a different path in the “Archiving Artifacts” section of the “Post-build Actions” for a job..
If the above steps didn’t work then remove all the contents inside workspace directory.
Go to the Jenkins home directory. The default directory for Jenkins is /var/lib/jenkins and remove all the folders and files available inside the workspace directory. Use the command below:
sudo rm -rf workspace/*With the help of the above steps, we can easily free up the space used in Jenkins.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we learned to clean up the Jenkins home directory by using the remove command mentioned above.