Summary

So, right down to it, I gave the feature of allowing ‘build triggers remotely’ to the Jenkins(/Hudson) CAS plugin, thus allowing HTTP GET requests to bypass CAS authentication on ‘build triggers remotely’ links (i.e. http://JENKINS_URL/build?token=SMTHNG). It was one of my ways to give something back to this awesome tool. You can see the code here,  whose pull request has been made , alongside with its issue. Not so interesting reasons of why I did it, are detailed below, comments of code/reasons/whatever are welcome

Context

At work, we are starting to use hudson/jenkins to build and deploy each module of the new Bennu structure (~61 modules, all of them a Maven project and deployable on their own, a big change from what we had).

We already used a pre-forked version of Hudson, and seen that I had to make some changes to Hudson, I decided to upgrade. So, the question was Jenkins or Hudson? I Chose Jenkins, why?! no real good reason, I wanted to upgrade, I tried to google the choice, and found something in favor of Jenkins, plus the fact that the main community moved to Jenkins and the fact that I know that corporations can be tough on O.S., and I’m all in favor of open source, I chose Jenkins :).

Anywho, before I realized that Jenkins has SSH access (!!) I decided to tackle an old problem that I had solved before with the use of Apache, that was authentication on Jenkins through CAS. We had chosen Apache before to handle CAS authentication, instead of the Hudson CAS plugin, because it was the simplest way to allow CAS authentication while making sure that the ‘build trigger remotely’ urls (something like http://JENKINS_URL/build?token=SMTHNG) were accessible without CAS authentication for some hosts, so that my SVN hooks could have trigger the build when something had changed. We weren’t actually very happy with the Apache solution, as it sometimes the connection fails with a segfault on the Apache side (?! yeah, really!)!! not sure why, not planning on pulling out the GDB, after trying to search a bit for that bug, I just resigned to use it as it was, after all, we didn’t used the web interface all that much. Something that is bound to change with the new infrastructure used for Bennu.