Artifact retention policies in Jenkins - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Artifact retention policies

📖 Scenario: You are managing a Jenkins pipeline that builds software projects. Each build produces artifacts like compiled files or reports. To save disk space, you want to keep only a limited number of recent artifacts and discard older ones automatically.

🎯 Goal: Set up a Jenkins pipeline script that defines artifact retention policies to keep only the last 3 builds' artifacts and discard older ones.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Jenkins pipeline script with a pipeline block

Add a post section with always condition

Use archiveArtifacts to save build artifacts

Use buildDiscarder with logRotator to keep only last 3 builds

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

In real projects, managing disk space by cleaning old build artifacts is important to keep Jenkins servers healthy and fast.

💼 Career

Understanding artifact retention policies is essential for DevOps engineers to maintain CI/CD pipelines efficiently.

1

Create basic Jenkins pipeline

Create a Jenkins pipeline script with a pipeline block and a stages section containing one stage named Build. Inside the stage, add a steps block with a shell command echo "Building project".

Jenkins

pipeline {
    agent any
    stages {
        stage('Build') {
            steps {
                // Your code here
            }
        }
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use pipeline and stage blocks. Use sh to run shell commands.

2

Add artifact archiving step

Inside the Build stage's steps block, add an archiveArtifacts step to archive all files matching **/*.jar.

Jenkins

pipeline {
    agent any
    stages {
        stage('Build') {
            steps {
                sh 'echo "Building project"'
                // Your code here
            }
        }
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use archiveArtifacts with the artifacts parameter set to '**/*.jar'.

3

Add artifact retention policy

Add a options block inside the pipeline block. Inside options, add a buildDiscarder with a logRotator that keeps only the last 3 builds by setting numToKeepStr: '3'.

Jenkins

pipeline {
    agent any
    options {
        // Your code here
    }
    stages {
        stage('Build') {
            steps {
                sh 'echo "Building project"'
                archiveArtifacts artifacts: '**/*.jar'
            }
        }
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use options block with buildDiscarder(logRotator(numToKeepStr: '3')).

4

Print confirmation message

Add a post section inside the pipeline block with an always condition. Inside always, add a script block that prints "Artifact retention policy applied" using echo.

Jenkins

pipeline {
    agent any
    options {
        buildDiscarder(logRotator(numToKeepStr: '3'))
    }
    stages {
        stage('Build') {
            steps {
                sh 'echo "Building project"'
                archiveArtifacts artifacts: '**/*.jar'
            }
        }
    }
    // Your code here
}

Need a hint?

Use post { always { script { echo 'Artifact retention policy applied' } } } inside the pipeline.