On February 24th, I’m taking the beta for the Jenkins Certification. This beta is different than beta exams from Oracle. In particular, it is only being offered on one day. The only choices you have are:

• whether you want the morning or afternoon offering. It’s also only being offered in 12 cities (8 in the US and 4 in Europe). I chose the afternoon because I’ll probably be up late the night before. (yeah, I know. not ideal for taking an exam)
• whether you want the Open Source or Enterprise version of the exam. I chose Enterprise because we use it at work and I like some of the features like templates.

This isn’t a great time for me to study for or take an exam. The exam is being held, literally the day after the robot is due for robotics team on which I mentor the programmers. This means I have little spare time. Especially for the week before the exam.  It’s worth a shot though. I know a lot about Jenkins without studying. And studying for the exam has filled in a lot of what I don’t know nicely.

I started studying two weeks ago (when I registered.)  I wanted to use a trial license for the enterprise edition so I could play with those features at home. I checked the evaluation agreement and it said that trial licenses default to 30 days. I checked again today and it says 15 days so either they fixed it or I misread it. It’s possible they fixed it because I did inform them of the discrepancy.

I filled out the trial form which gave me a 15 day license. I used the contact us form on Cloudbees site to ask about the 15 vs 30 days. They don’t allow gmail as an email provider so I used my javaranch address. (I get that they only want to talk to companies but what if someone is running a business our of gmail?)

A two week trial is also a big annoying because you get the green bar that resists being hidden reminding you that license is about to expire. This left me with a problem because I wanted to review some features a few days before the exam. I’d have installed the enterprise trial license if I had know that it was only good for 15 days.

I checked the license again and it doesn’t say that you can’t use two trials back to back. That would solve my problem. You can’t get another trial for the same instance id. You can for the same email.

Note: Check the trial agreement before attempting this to make sure it isn’t banned in the future.

Approach 1 – Clean install

First, I renamed my working directory so Jenkins thinks it is clean install. I’m not attached to any of my configuration or jobs. So a clean install is fine. I did backup my old install in case I wanted to check on my settings:

mv $HOME/.jenkins $HOME/.jenkins-bkp

Then I started Jenkins:

java -jar jenkins.war

This gives a clean install with no plugins. I then followed the instructions to convert to Enterprise including getting a trial license successfully.

I did want the exact same plugins along with build tools, so rather than redoing that all manually, I ran:

cp -r $HOME/.jenkins-bkp/plugins/* $HOME/.jenkins/plugins

cp $HOME/.jenkins-bkp/config.xml $HOME/.jenkins/config.xml

I then hand edited the config.xml to set <useSecurity>false</useSecurity> instead of true.

Approach 2 – Delete the license files

The technique described here to delete a few files also might work.