Clean up a failed release in the Jenkins public repository

When contributing a plugin to the Jenkins public repository, several things can go wrong and leave traces which are difficult to clean up. Wrong credentials, missing configuration and network instability are just a few of the issues we could face. A common (and suggested) practice – for those who don’t like to get the hands dirty with SCM stuff – is to simply increment the plugin version, ignore the current one and move on with a new release (Jenkins guide: Releasing to jenkinsci).

As I like to keep things tight and clean, I prefer to follow another direction and rollback the whole process as if nothing has ever happened. As so, this short guide is a reminder – mostly to myself – on how to bring the GIT repository of my Jenkins plugin back to a clean state. Misusage of the commands below are potentially dangerous. Therefore, use them carefully and at your own risk!

To contextualize, the upstream repository is the jenkinsci and origin is my fork from it. Also, in this example I’m trying to release a plugin with artifactId my-plugin in its version 1.0.0. So, the plugin’s version in the current pom.xml file is 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.

First, maven-release-plugin will create a tag of your plugin in the repository. By default it will be my-plugin-1.0.0. These are the commands to remove this tag from the upstream:

git tag -d play-autotest-plugin-1.0.0
git push upstream :play-autotest-plugin-1.0.0

Next, the release process will generate two additional commits to prepare the project for the next development cycle. These commits are shown on Github as follows:

[maven-release-plugin] prepare for next development iteration</br> [maven-release-plugin] prepare release my-plugin-1.0.0

To undo them, we need to point the HEAD two commits behind:

git push -f upstream HEAD^^:master

Since we are executing the release command locally, the same commits will be present in our sandbox. To undo them, simply reset with the origin, which is still clean.

git reset --hard origin/master

Finally, two files are created locally as output, which should be removed before the next attempt to release the plugin:

rm pom.xml.releaseBackup release.properties

Now, everything is back to normal. Hope it’s useful!