Configure Jenkins Job to Run Batch Command

In the previous tutorial of How to Install Jenkins , we successfully installed and run Jenkins on our system. In this tutorial, we will continue from the same place where we left. If you have stopped Jenkins then you need to change your default directory in your shell to the one in which you downloaded the war file and run the command java -jar jenkins.war again. This will initialize Jenkins and will ask you for username and password. If you have not changed the password and username in the previous tutorial, your username will be admin and the password will be same that was used to unlock the downloading process. So coming back to the Jenkins, in this tutorial we will be focusing on following:

• Creating a New Jenkins Job
• Configure Jenkins Job to run Batch Command

Before starting on Jenkins, I would like to tell you that we will be using Windows commands in this tutorial. Although the transition is not very tough and we have previously discussed also, but still if you have other OS than Windows, please know the transition commands beforehand.

How to Create a New Jenkins Job?

Jenkins Job is a parent element and sometimes also referred as project. With in that you can look at the results, console, reports etc at the one place. We will come to all these things a little later but for now, let’s just create a new Jenkins Job.

1.Click on New Item

2.Write any name you like, we are using Postman Collection here

Below you will see a list of different projects you can start. Every project is defined with couple of lines. We will be using Freestyle project in this tutorial. Now if you read the lines below Freestyle project in Jenkins, they are a little confusing. So let us simplify it.

What is a freestyle project?

A freestyle project is a project in which you can run any types of build. These builds can include shell scripts, dos scripts or maybe invoke ant etc. If you visit the development guide of Jenkins, you will see that they specify a freestyle project as Jenkins can be used to perform the typical build server work, such as doing continuous/official/nightly builds, run tests, or perform some repetitive batch tasks. This is called “free-style software project” in Jenkins.

So basically freestyle project is something which is very flexible and which lets you build, run and execute a variety of things. And most of all, the majority of plugins are written for freestyle projects in Jenkins. So it kind of becomes a primitive choice.

Coming back to creating the workspace, just select Freestyle project by clicking on it and press OK. The workspace will be created.

Leave this screen and move to Dashboard by clicking Jenkins.

You will see your project name on the dashboard

Click on the project name and you will enter in the Project or a Job. So this way we have created our first project/job in Jenkins. We will work in this project only. In the next section we will learn about how to run batch commands in Jenkins

How to Configure Jenkins Job to Run Batch Command?

Now that we have created our own Jenkins Job, we will move forward towards running batch commands in the Jenkins. A batch command is a command that is run in the shell of your system like command prompt in Windows. This name comes from the batch file that were created for early operating systems like DOS and Windows. The commands which were mentioned in these files could be run only through the shell of the system. Hence, the name derived as batch commands for the individual commands. So by following these steps, we will be running batch commands in Jenkins.

I hope you are inside the Jenkins Job/Project and the following screen is visible to you at your system.

1.Go to Configure.

2.Go to Build.

3. Open the dropdown in the batch section and click on Execute Windows Batch Command

Note: Since we are on a windows machine, we will be running the commands which are run on windows command prompt. If you have MAC then you should select Execute Shell in the above section and then execute the shell commands only. We have previously discussed these commands for MAC that we will run here. Please refer the tutorial How to run Collections in Postman using Newman Commands .

4. After selecting the option, a box will appear to enter the commands. So for now, just for testing we will run the command to check if we have Newman installed on the machine or not which is required to run Jenkins with Newman. This can be done using command newman –version

5. Click on Save and the command will be saved.

6. Click on Build Now.

7. You will see the build being run below the above menu

8. Once the build is complete, click on the ball located in the left of the Build Number. It will take you to the console.

9. Now you can see the command run successfully and the output shown successfully.

Since now that we have Installed Jenkins and learnt How to Configure Jenkins Job to Run Batch Commands, it’s time to run a Postman Collections on Jenkins.

Execute windows batch command from Jenkins fails but runs fine in cmd.exe

I am trying to run this command in jenkins after a MSbuild

Y: is a mapped network drive. This runs fine in cmd.exe but when trying to run it in Jenkins, I am getting the error Invalid drive specification .

Here is the output from jenkins:

Any help would be appreciated.

7 Answers 7

I too had a similar issue once. Try granting the Jenkins service «Logon as This account» right under services.msc and make sure the account you type there is the same as the one you use for running cmd.exe .

These commands based on Java JAR files worked for me:
cmd
net use x: \\
xcopy «dist\» x:\ /Y

And that’s it! I spent lot of time figure out this issue and nothing worked until I wrote CMD and NET USE!
Neither I didn’t need to change permission on jenkins service nor use runas command.

But I must mention that everyone had read and write access to the network drive.

Easy fix for most things.

1. Make a batch command with what your trying to run, filename.bat with the command prompt text inside.
2. Make a normal windows shortcut for the batch command, edit the shortcuts advanced properties and check the «Run as admin» (tricky tricky).
3. Now run the filename.lnk shortcut from jenkins command line call, this will get you around all the jazz.

I had the same issue with my Windows Task running a batch file (I know it is not exactly same) where I tried to copy file to network location i.e. shared drive. I used the UNC path and mapped drive as well but the error was same. For me it was error number 4 — MS DOS error code. The solution was to use net use command! Hope that it helps.

The solution of adarshr (i.e., modifying the log on credentials of the service) has worked for me for a part of the problem: in my case, this allowed me to successfully check out a mercurial repository (using ssh protocol), which I could not do when using ‘Local System account’.

However, I still have different behavior between running a command-line script or running the same script from a jenkins ‘execute shell’ script in the build section. In my case, I compile a Python extension. In Jenkins, I cannot import the extension (I don’t see any error, but the execution simply stops, so I suspect it crashes).

If I uninstall the service and run the slave agent as a Java Web Start, I do get the same behavoir. It is a temporary fix for me, but it means that when I reboot the windows build machine, I have to manually re-start the Java Web Start application.

So -at least in my case- it is clear that this is a credential problem.