How to move Jenkins from one PC to another

Following the Jenkins wiki, you'll have to:

• Install a fresh Jenkins instance on the new server
• Be sure the old and the new Jenkins instances are stopped
• Archive all the content of the JENKINS_HOME of the old Jenkins instance
• Extract the archive into the new JENKINS_HOME directory
• Launch the new Jenkins instance
• Do not forget to change documentation/links to your new instance of Jenkins :)
• Do not forget to change the owner of the new Jenkins files : chown -R jenkins:jenkins $JENKINS_HOME

JENKINS_HOME is by default located in ~/.jenkins on a Linux installation, yet to exactly find where it is located, go on the http://your_jenkins_url/configure page and check the value of the first parameter: Home directory; this is the JENKINS_HOME.

In case your JENKINS_HOME directory is too large to copy, and all you need is to set up same jobs, Jenkins Plugins and Jenkins configurations (and don't need old Job artifacts and reports), then you can use the ThinBackup Plugin:

1. Install ThinBackup on both the source and the target Jenkins servers

2. Configure the backup directory on both (in Manage Jenkins → ThinBackup → Settings)

3. On the source Jenkins, go to ThinBackup → Backup Now

4. Copy from Jenkins source backup directory to the Jenkins target backup directory

5. On the target Jenkins, go to ThinBackup → Restore, and then restart the Jenkins service.

6. If some plugins or jobs are missing, copy the backup content directly to the target JENKINS_HOME.

7. If you had user authentication on the source Jenkins, and now locked out on the target Jenkins, then edit Jenkins config.xml, set <useSecurity> to false, and restart Jenkins.