At the time of writing, you can only have one notification strategy, so some of the advanced options we
saw in Section 8.3, “More Advanced Email Notification” are not yet possible with IM.
Developers will be notified via their favorite IM client (see Figure 8.13, “Jenkins Jabber messages in
action”). Developers can also interact with the build server via the chat session, using a set of simple
commands. Some examples of a few of the more useful commands are shown here:
- !build game-of-life—Start the game-of-life build immediately.
- !build game-of-life 15m—Start the game-of-life build in 15 minutes.
- !comment game-of-life 207 'oops'—Add a build description to a given build.
- !status game-of-life—display the status of the latest build for this build job.
- !testresult game-of-life—display the full test results for the latest build.
- !health game-of-life—display a more complete summary of the health status of the latest
build.
You can get a full list of commands by sending the !help message to the Jenkins user.
Figure 8.13. Jenkins Jabber messages in action
8.7.2. IM Notification using IRC
Another popular form of Internet-based Instant Messaging is Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. IRC is
traditionally focused on group discussions (though direct messaging is also supported), and is a very
popular form of communication for developers, particularly in the Open Source world.