Jenkins Subversion Plugin

This plugin adds the Subversion support (via SVNKit) to Jenkins.

Basic Usage

Once this plugin is installed, you'll see Subversion as one of the options in the SCM section of job configurations. See inline help for more information about how to use it.

Usage with Server Certificates

An important note for those wanting to use client certificates to authenticate to your subversion server. Your PKCS12 cert file must not have a blank passphrase or a blank export password as it will cause authentication to fail. Refer to SVNKit:0000271 for more details.

Advanced Features/Configurations

Proxy

You can set the proxy in C:/Users/<user>/AppData/Roaming/Subversion/servers (Windows) or ~/.subversion/servers (Linux)

(Jenkins as a service on Windows : C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\AppData\Roaming\Subversion\servers)

There's a tension between doing this in Jenkins vs following the existing Subversion convention — the former has a benefit of being available on all the agents. In this case, the proxy is a system dependent setting, which might be different between different agents, so I think it makes sense to keep it in ~/.subversion/servers. (See https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-4041)

Post-commit hook

Jenkins can poll Subversion repositories for changes, and while this is reasonably efficient, this can only happen up to every once a minute, so you may still have to wait a full minute before Jenkins detects a change.

To reduce this delay, you can set up a post commit hook so the Subversion repository can notify Jenkins whenever a change is made to that repository. To do this, put the following script in your post-commit file (in the $REPOSITORY/hooks directory):

REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"
UUID=`svnlook uuid $REPOS`
/usr/bin/wget \
  --header "Content-Type:text/plain;charset=UTF-8" \
  --post-data "`svnlook changed --revision $REV $REPOS`" \
  --output-document "-" \
  --timeout=2 \
  http://server/subversion/${UUID}/notifyCommit?rev=$REV

Notice the rev=$REV parameter, this tells Jenkins to check out exactly the revision which was reported by the hook. If your job has multiple Subversion module locations defined, this may lead to inconsistent checkouts - so it's recommended to leave out '?rev=$REV' in that case.
You may also want to leave out the '?rev=$REV' parameter if you are using Maven to release your projects and do not want Jenkins to build the intermediate prepare-release commit (ie: the released artifacts).
See JENKINS-14254 for details.

Jobs on Jenkins need to be configured with the SCM polling option to benefit from this behavior. This is so that you can have some jobs that are never triggered by the post-commit hook (in the $REPOSITORY/hooks directory), such as release related tasks, by omitting the SCM polling option. The configured polling can have any schedule (probably infrequent like monthly or yearly). The net effect is as if polling happens out of their usual cycles.

For this to work, your Jenkins has to allow anonymous read access (specifically, "Job > Read" access) to the system. If access control to your Jenkins is more restrictive, you may need to specify the username and password, depending on how your authentication is configured.

If your Jenkins uses the "Prevent Cross Site Request Forgery exploits" security option, the above request will be rejected with 403 errors ("No valid crumb was included"). The crumb needed in this request can be obtained from the URL http:``//server/crumbIssuer/api/xml (or /api/json). This can be included in the wget call above with something like this:

--header `wget -q --output-document - \
  'http://server/crumbIssuer/api/xml?xpath=concat(//crumbRequestField,":",//crumb)'`

Considerations

Since wget by default retries up to 20 times when not succeeding within the given timeout, --timeout=2 on a slow SVN server may cause Jenkins to scan the repository many more times than needed, further slowing down the SVN Server which after a while makes Jenkins unresponsive.

Possible solutions to this problem are to increase the timeout, to add a lower maximum number of retries using the argument --retries=3 or to make the wget call asynchronous (and thus ignoring any communication errors) by adding 2>&1 & last on the wget call.

Having the timeout too low can also cause your commits to hang and throw either 502 errors if you are behind a proxy, or post-commit errors if not. Increasing the timeout until you no longer see wget retrying should fix the issue.

More robust *nix post-commit hook example

The basic script above is fine if your server does not do authentication or you have no problem providing anonymous read access to Jenkins (as well as anonymous read to all the individual jobs you want to trigger if you are using project-based matrix authorization). Here is a script that includes the more robust security concepts hinted at in the basic example.

#!/bin/sh
REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"

# No environment is passed to svn hook scripts; set paths to external tools explicitly:
WGET=/usr/bin/wget
SVNLOOK=/usr/bin/svnlook

# If your server requires authentication, it is recommended that you set up a .netrc file to store your username and password
# Better yet, since Jenkins v. 1.426, use the generated API Token in place of the password
# See https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Authenticating+scripted+clients
# Since no environment is passed to hook scripts, you need to set $HOME (where your .netrc lives)
# By convention, this should be the home dir of whichever user is running the svn process (i.e. apache)
HOME=/var/www/

UUID=`$SVNLOOK uuid $REPOS`
NOTIFY_URL="subversion/${UUID}/notifyCommit?rev=${REV}"
CRUMB_ISSUER_URL='crumbIssuer/api/xml?xpath=concat(//crumbRequestField,":",//crumb)'

function notifyCI {
    # URL to Jenkins server application (with protocol, hostname, port and deployment descriptor if needed)
    CISERVER=$1

    # Check if "[X] Prevent Cross Site Request Forgery exploits" is activated
    # so we can present a valid crumb or a proper header
    CONTENT_TYPE_HEADER="--header Content-Type:text/plain;charset=UTF-8"
    CRUMB=`$WGET --auth-no-challenge --output-document - ${CISERVER}/${CRUMB_ISSUER_URL}`
    if [ "$CRUMB" != "" ]; then CRUMB_HEADER="--header $CRUMB"; fi

    $WGET \
        --auth-no-challenge \
        $CONTENT_TYPE_HEADER \
        $CRUMB_HEADER \
        --post-data "`$SVNLOOK changed --revision $REV $REPOS`" \
        --output-document "-"\
        --timeout=2 \
        ${CISERVER}/${NOTIFY_URL}
}

# The code above was placed in a function so you can easily notify multiple Jenkins servers:
notifyCI "http://myPC.company.local:8080"
notifyCI "http://jenkins.company.com:8080/jenkins"

The script above takes care of the Prevent Cross Site Request Forgery exploits option if you have it enabled on your server. If you do not have that option enabled, the extra wget call is harmless, but feel free to remove it if you do not need it. The script above also requires that you set up a .netrc file in the home directory of the user you are running subversion as (either the svnserve process or httpd). For more info on .netrc file syntax, look here. The script above makes it easy to notify multiple Jenkins servers of the same SVN commit. If you have a .netrc file, it keeps it easy even if they have different admin users set up. If you don't want to mess with a .netrc file, you could just hard-code the user and password (or API Token) info in the file and add --username=user and --password="pass" flags to the wget calls.

Windows specific post-commit hook

The above script is difficult under the Windows command processor seeing as there is no support for backtick output extraction and there is no built in wget command. Instead the following contents can be added to post-commit.bat (in the $REPOSITORY/hooks directory):

SET REPOS=%1
SET REV=%2
SET CSCRIPT=%windir%\system32\cscript.exe
SET VBSCRIPT=C:\Repositories\post-commit-hook-jenkins.vbs
SET SVNLOOK=C:\Subversion\svnlook.exe
SET JENKINS=http://server/
REM AUTHORIZATION: Set to "" for anonymous acceess
REM AUTHORIZATION: Set to encoded Base64 string, generated from "user_id:api_token" 
REM                found on Jenkins under "user/configure/API token"
REM                User needs "Job/Read" permission on Jenkins
SET AUTHORIZATION=""
"%CSCRIPT%" "%VBSCRIPT%" "%REPOS%" %2 "%SVNLOOK%" %JENKINS% %AUTHORIZATION%

The batch file relies on the following VBScript being available in the file designated by the VBSCRIPT variable above:

repos         = WScript.Arguments.Item(0)
rev           = WScript.Arguments.Item(1)
svnlook       = WScript.Arguments.Item(2)
jenkins       = WScript.Arguments.Item(3)
authorization = WScript.Arguments.Item(4)

Set shell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

Set uuidExec = shell.Exec(svnlook & " uuid " & repos)
Do Until uuidExec.StdOut.AtEndOfStream
  uuid = uuidExec.StdOut.ReadLine()
Loop
Wscript.Echo "uuid=" & uuid

Set changedExec = shell.Exec(svnlook & " changed --revision " & rev & " " & repos)
Do Until changedExec.StdOut.AtEndOfStream
  changed = changed + changedExec.StdOut.ReadLine() + Chr(10)
Loop
Wscript.Echo "changed=" & changed

url = jenkins + "crumbIssuer/api/xml?xpath=concat(//crumbRequestField,"":"",//crumb)"
Set http = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
http.open "GET", url, False
http.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "text/plain;charset=UTF-8"
if not authorization = "" then
  http.setRequestHeader "Authorization", "Basic " + authorization
end if
http.send
crumb = null
if http.status = 200 then
  crumb = split(http.responseText,":")
end if

url = jenkins + "subversion/" + uuid + "/notifyCommit?rev=" + rev
Wscript.Echo url

Set http = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
http.open "POST", url, False
http.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "text/plain;charset=UTF-8"
if not authorization = "" then
  http.setRequestHeader "Authorization", "Basic " + authorization
end if
if not isnull(crumb) then 
  http.setRequestHeader crumb(0),crumb(1)
end if
http.send changed
if http.status <> 200 then
  Wscript.Echo "Error. HTTP Status: " & http.status & ". Body: " & http.responseText
end if

Perform Polling from the Controller

JIRA JENKINS-5413 documents problems with running the SCM polling trigger on agents. Version 1.21 of the Subversion plugin can perform the polling on the Jenkins controller if the hudson.scm.SubversionSCM.pollFromMaster system property is set to true.

Subversion Revision and URL information as Environment Variables

The Subversion SCM plugin exports the svn revisions and URLs of the build's subversion modules as environment variables. These are $SVN_REVISION_n and $SVN_URL_n, where n is the 1-based index of the module in the configuration.

For backwards compatibility if there's only a single module, its values are also exported as $SVN_REVISION and $SVN_URL.

Note that the revision number exposed is the 'last-changed' revision number of the particular directory and not the current revision of the repository. (See What are these two revision numbers in svn info?)

Kerberos authentication

To connect to a Kerberos authenticated SVN repository see the Subversion Plugin HTTPS Kerberos authentication page.

TroubleShooting

Someone suggested in the Jenkins IRC channel that if you are getting an error and a long svnkit stack trace that looks like:

 ERROR: svn: authentication cancelled

org.tmatesoft.svn.core.SVNCancelException: svn: authentication cancelled

Then,

• Try to delete (back up) the ~/.subversion folder and retry the build. Apparently mixing the command line svn client checkouts with those of your Jenkins jobs messes it up.
• See http://blog.vinodsingh.com/2009/08/hudson-svn-authentication-cancelled.html for details.

You could try to enable verbose log over the plugin an SVNKit library, to do that add a logger to those loggers with log level ALL , it is really verbose so just after configure it make the test and change the log level again to ERROR or INFO.

• svnkit
• svnkit-network
• svnkit-wc
• hudson.scm.SubversionSCM

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lightweight checkout capability for Subversion on Multibranch Pipeline projects and Externals support

Lightweight checkout capability for Subversion on Multibranch Pipeline projects does not support externals, so in order to use Subversion plugin in a Multibranch Pipeline project with a repository with externals, you should disable the lightweight checkout capability by setting the property `-Djenkins.scm.impl.subversion.SubversionSCMFileSystem.disable=<true/false>`

Change Log

Version 2.12.2 and newer

See GitHub releases.

Older

See the old changelog.

Trademarks

Apache, Apache Subversion and Subversion are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation