13.6. Migrating Build Jobs

There are times when you need to move or copy Jenkins build jobs from one Jenkins instance to another, without copying the entire Jenkins configuration. For example, you might be migrating your build jobs to a Jenkins instance on a brand new box, with system configuration details that vary from the original machine. Or you might be restoring an old build job that you have archived.

As we have seen, Jenkins stores all of the data it needs for a project in a subdirectory of the jobs directory in your Jenkins home directory. This subdirectory is easy to identify—it has the same name as your project. Incidentally, this is one reason why your project names really shouldn’t contain spaces, particularly if Jenkins is running under Unix or Linux—it makes maintenance and admin tasks a lot easier if the project names are also well-behaved Unix filenames.