Master-to-master API

We are adding plugins to Jenkins that allows it to talk to other Jenkins masters. To enable plugins to take advantage of this mechanism and interact with other masters, this plugin defines a small contract.

The InterMasterConnection extension point, which can be implemented by any number of other plugins, lists currently connected other masters. Each connected master is represented by a Master object, which exposes several key properties of masters such as the following:

• URL of the master
• RSA public key that uniquely identifies the instance globally

The Master interface also provides access to a Channel object when the underlying transport supports that, and it also provides the lookup API to query other service interfaces.

Master master = ...;
BuildTriggerService bts = master.getService(BuildTriggerService.class);
bts.trigger("foo")

Sample implementation

This plugin is currently in the beta stage and we are looking for feedback to the API.

This plugin also currently comes with the simple implementaion that directly connects two Jenkins masters point-to-point via Channel, which helps validate the API design. The plan is to move this functionality to another plugin before release, and make it the default implementation of this contract.

If you are interested in trying this out, launch Jenkins, go to the Manage Jenkins page, and click Simple Inter-Master Communications. You can have it talk to another Jenkins instance by typing in its URL. The Connect all button provides a crude way to reattempt connections to masters when they are dead.