update notifications through jenkins plugins

Question

I am creating a build and deploy process for my android application for my company.

I have completed the build process. I used ant plugin to build my application. I used two target "clean" and "debug". I am not sure if these target build the apk file for my application correctly or not.

Another thing I wanted to ask you was that now that the build process is complete I want to have something in the post build process which takes a file and uses all the email addresses and send an update notification to all the email addresses in that file.

Is this possible ? if so can you please guide me how to do this ? I see jabber and some other plugins to send notifications. I do not know how to actually set them up with my project, what sorts of targets I need to use.

The application is running on android tablets. when ever someone logs in from the application they either sign in or sign up a new account. all the devices are registered. what I want to do basically is that send an update notification to all these devices or users that there is an update available for this application. Or even better could I update the application automatically on all these devices.

Can someone please guide me on how to complete this task ? If someone knows a better tool that I can easily integrate with jenkins build process to complete the task, I will be glad to know about it .

Thank you

Answer 1

The "Jenkins Mailer Plugin" allows you to define a post build action for sending mail notifications. You can also use the "Jenkins Email Extension Plugin" plugin https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Email-ext+plugin if you need more control over the email itself.

To customize the recipients from a text file, you would set the recipients to a Jenkins variable (like $MyRecipients). Now, to populate that variable from a file, you could use the "Environment Injector Plugin" https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/EnvInject+Plugin.

There you can specify a properties file to load as an Action in your step. You will want to use an absolute path to the file (like /jenkins/maillist), and make sure the content of that file follows regular shell syntax for setting properties. It should be something like:

MyRecipients="[e-mail] [e-mail] [e-mail]"

I haven't tried this specifically, so I hop there are no syntax errors here, but the general approach should work. Not sure how well that will scale though. If you intend to send mail to many users, you may instead want to implement a shell script to call that just does this outside of jenkins.

Sven