If you click Manage Hudson / Reload Configuration From Disk, Hudson will reload all the build history data.
If the data on disk is messed up, you'll need to go to your %HUDSON_HOME%\jobs\<projectname> directory and restore the build directories as they're supposed to be. Then reload config data.
If you're simply asking how to remove all build history, you can just delete the builds one by one via the UI if there are just a few, or go to the %HUDSON_HOME%\jobs\<projectname> directory and delete all the subdirectories there -- they correspond to the builds.
Afterwards restart the service for the changes to take effect.
You could modify the project configuration temporarily to save only the last 1 build, reload the configuration (which should trash the old builds), then change the configuration setting again to your desired value.
That script assumes you want to only delete a range of builds. To delete all builds for a given job, use this (tested):
// change this variable to match the name of the job whose builds you want to delete
def jobName = "Your Job Name"
def job = Jenkins.instance.getItem(jobName)
job.getBuilds().each { it.delete() }
// uncomment these lines to reset the build number to 1:
//job.nextBuildNumber = 1
//job.save()
Here is another option: delete the builds with cURL.
$ curl -X POST http://jenkins-host.tld:8080/jenkins/job/myJob/[1-56]/doDeleteAll
The above deletes build #1 to #56 for job myJob.
If authentication is enabled on the Jenkins instance, a user name and API token must be provided like this:
$ curl -u userName:apiToken -X POST http://jenkins-host.tld:8080/jenkins/job/myJob/[1-56]/doDeleteAll
The API token must be fetched from the /me/configure page in Jenkins. Just click on the "Show API Token..." button to display both the user name and the API token.
Edit: one might have to replace doDeleteAll by doDelete in the URLs above to make this work, depending on the configuration or the version of Jenkins used.
Open the file "nextBuildNumber" and change the number. After that reload Jenkins configuration. Note: "nextBuildNumber" file contains the next build no that will be used by Jenkins.
Another easy way to clean builds is by adding the Discard Old Plugin at the end of your jobs. Set a maximum number of builds to save and then run the job again:
If you want to clear the build history of MultiBranchProject (e.g. pipeline),
go to your Jenkins home page → Manage Jenkins → Script Console and run the following script:
Be careful with this command because it executes a rm -rf on each find result. You could exec this first to validate if the result are only the builds folder of you jobs