Currently it’s quite difficult to share and reuse the same workspace between multiple jobs and across nodes. There are some possible workarounds for achieving this, but each of them has its own drawback, e.g. stash/unstash pre-made artifacts, Copy Artifacts plugin or advanced job settings. A viable solution for this problem is the External Workspace Manager plugin, which facilitates workspace share and reuse across multiple Jenkins jobs and nodes. It also eliminates the need to copy, archive or move files. You can learn more about the design and goals of the External Workspace Manager project in this introductory blog post.

I’d like to announce that an alpha version of the External Manager Plugin has been released! It’s now public available for testing. To be able to install this plugin, you must follow the steps from the Experimental Plugins Update Center blog post.

The plugin’s wiki page may be accessed here. The documentation that helps you get started with this plugin may be found on the README page. To get an idea of what this plugin does, which are the features implemented so far and to see a working demo of it, you can watch my mid-term presentation that is available here. The slides for the presentation are shared on Google Slides.

My mentors, Martin and Oleg, and I have set up public meetings related to this plugin. You are invited to join our discussions if you’d like to get more insight about the project. The meetings are taking place twice a week on the Jenkins hangout, every Monday at 12 PM UTC and every Thursday at 5 PM UTC.

If you have any issues in setting up or using the plugin, please feel free to ask me on the plugin’s Gitter chat. The plugin is open-source, having the repository on GitHub, and you may contribute to it. Any feedback is welcome, and you may provide it either on the Gitter chat, or on Jira by using the external-workspace-manager-plugin component.