Mass removing builds

Ever wanted to mass remove builds of a certain project but did not want to click Delete Build -> Yes a thousand times?
Good news: There is an easier way!

Open Script Console

First of all, we need to open the Script Console.

1. Open your jenkins instance
2. Click on Manage Jenkins
3. Find the Script Console
4. You should see the Script Console now:

The Script Console provides us with a basic Groovy interpreter, coupled with some Jenkins libraries.

Mass removing builds

Put the following code into the script console and hit Run:

Jenkins.instance
  .getItemByFullName('<Job Name>')
  .builds
  .findAll {
    it.number > <MIN_BUILD> && it.number < <MAX_BUILD>
  }.each { it.delete() }

Lets go through it line-by-line:
In line one we get the Jenkins instance.

Line two retrieves the actual job. The job name can be found when opening the job on Jenkins:

The third line gets all builds of this job.
And finally in line four we call .findAll which gives us it. Each it is another build. With it.number we can access the build number.
Now in line five we can check if this number is within a range we defined.

Note: It is of course also possible to only remove post that are smaller OR greater than a certain limit. Additionally, the build date and any other build properties can be accessed. The only importance here is that if true is returned, it will be taken to the next instruction. Just calling true here would remove all builds. For more details take a look at the Build JavaDoc and Job JavaDoc.

In the end, in line six, we call .each on all builds that fall in our range and call it.delete() on them to finally delete them.

But be aware, this operation resolves in a lot of calls and can render your connection to Jenkins temporarily unusable.
With a really large amount of builds to be delete Jenkins can even become unresponsive temporarily.
I’d advice to not make the range too big and execute the script multiple times … it’s still much faster than clicking through Select Build -> Delete Build -> Yes for all builds.

Alternative

Another alternative would be to set the amount of kept builds to a limit and execute one successful build. This then will also delete all builds, that fall under the limit.

Keep in mind to re-set the limit after finishing.