Guide to Migrating Jenkins to a New Server

Jenkins is widely used in testing, and migrating it becomes necessary due to machine decommission, resource constraints, or task conflicts.

1. Environment preparation

On a new machine install required dependencies such as Tomcat and JDK; multiple independent Jenkins instances can share a machine.

Copy the Tomcat installer to a target directory and edit conf/server.xml to change three ports, ensuring they are free.

Copy jenkins.war into Tomcat's webapps directory.

Configure Tomcat startup scripts:

Step1: give execution permission to shell scripts: chmod +x *.sh Step2: add new Tomcat paths to ~/.bash_profile:

export CATALINA_BASE2=/home/xxxx/software/apache-tomcat-7.0.59

export CATALINA_HOME2=/home/xxxx/software/apache-tomcat-7.0.59

then run source ~/.bash_profile Step3: add the required content to startup.sh and shutdown.sh (content omitted for brevity).

Step4: in catalina.sh set the Jenkins home directory to avoid conflicts with the default ~/.jenkins directory.

Step5: start Jenkins with sh startup.sh.

2. Jenkins migration

After preparing the environment, copy the original Jenkins home directory (including config.xml, jobs, users, workspace, and plugins) to the new location, then restart Jenkins.

Tip: Ensure the copied files belong to the Tomcat user (e.g., chown -R tomcat:tomcat <directory>) to prevent permission issues.

Tip: If startup problems occur, check the log directory for specific errors such as port conflicts.