Buildslaves on separate machines?

[mikepurvis]

This role seems primarily focused on configuring the master. What would be my best path forward for setting up slaves on other boxes?

[rasputnik]

It really depends what you're trying to build. We've used the Swarm plugin to connect up workers successfully (because it doesn't require any manual steps) and then create a role for each workload we want to run, and configure the swarm agents environment to broadcast appropriate labels.

[mikepurvis]

I ended up making a bespoke role specific to my workload, which boiled down to:

• Install packages (debhelper, devscripts, git, cowbuilder, python-virtualenv, default-jre-headless)
• create jenkins-slave user (with homedir, shell, etc).
• inject SSH key from master
• add known sources for our SCM providers (bitbucket, etc)
• miscellaneous config files for the above.

And then I had to go in manually on the master and add each host from the web UI, including specifying the work dir.

So most of that is pretty customized to my scenario, but it does feel like there'd be room for a generic "Jenkins SSH Slave" role that could handle setting up the master's key, installing Java, and then wiring things up on the master end to talk to it.