Jenkins Templates - maven

Question

I am new to the Cloudbees Enterprise of Jenkins and to the concept of "templates".
I am trying to define a new template and this template will be used by 20-30 number of jobs. The job is a basic build job. After the build, I would like to have code analysis plugin. How can I define it in the Jenkins Template.
I can define it while creating a direct job in "Post Build Actions" but not sure how to define the same in a template.
Do you have any solutions/ suggestions ?

Answer 1

Cloudbees templates plugin is very powerful but not easy to master. Creation and administration of templates is not as user-friendly as one wishes it to be. ;)
For an introduction I recommend reading the following resources:
Basic concept
Template documentation
Tutorial for simple job template
Make sure you understand the difference between builder template and job template. I assume you want to create a number of jobs using the job template. Follow these steps:
First of all create a normal job that contains all actions you want to perform by all templated jobs.
Make sure this job works as expected for one example configuration.
Now create a new job template:
You will need to decide, which parts of the job configuration need to be adapted to each jobs configuration (e.g. source code repository). Create an parameter for each configuration option.
You might want to do some pre-processing on the job templates parameters using some transformation script - but we skip that for now.
Now you need to add an XML description of what the generated job should do. I recommend copying this XML description from our example job created in step #1. You can access it via this URL: http://your-jenkins/job/this-job/config.xml. Simply copy&paste the XML code in the browser. Newer Jenkins versions also allow to read the jobs XML configuration via the user interface.
Finally you need to fill in the templates arguments within the XML configuration. Simply replace the specific (hard-coded) values by a reference to the name of the templates parameters created before: ${param_name}
Save the template
Now create a new job. On the job creation screen you should be able to select your newly created job template as job type. After creating a job of the templates type you can define all template parameters for this specific job.
Try to run the template-based job and make sure it works as expected.
Create more template-based jobs as needed.
All template-based jobs share the build steps defined by the job template. If you change the job template later on, all depending jobs are updated accordingly. This is a very efficient way to administrate a large number of similar jobs. It is very much worth the effort. Good luck!