Book Image

Learning Continuous Integration with Jenkins

By : Nikhil Pathania
Book Image

Learning Continuous Integration with Jenkins

By: Nikhil Pathania

Overview of this book

In past few years, Agile software development has seen tremendous growth across the world. There is huge demand for software delivery solutions that are fast yet flexible to frequent amendments. As a result, CI and continuous delivery methodologies are gaining popularity. Jenkins’ core functionality and flexibility allows it to fit in a variety of environments and can help streamline the development process for all stakeholders. This book starts off by explaining the concepts of CI and its significance in the Agile world with a whole chapter dedicated to it. Next, you’ll learn to configure and set up Jenkins. You’ll gain a foothold in implementing CI and continuous delivery methods. We dive into the various features offered by Jenkins one by one exploiting them for CI. After that, you’ll find out how to use the built-in pipeline feature of Jenkins. You’ll see how to integrate Jenkins with code analysis tools and test automation tools in order to achieve continuous delivery. Next, you’ll be introduced to continuous deployment and learn to achieve it using Jenkins. Through this book’s wealth of best practices and real-world tips, you'll discover how easy it is to implement a CI service with Jenkins.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Learning Continuous Integration with Jenkins
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction to Jenkins


Jenkins is an open source Continuous Integration tool. However, it's not limited to Continuous Integration alone. In the upcoming chapters, we will see how Jenkins can be used to achieve Continuous Delivery, Continuous Testing, and Continuous Deployment. Jenkins is supported by a large number of plugins that enhance its capability. The Jenkins tool is written in Java and so are its plugins. The tool has a minimalistic GUI that can be enhanced using specific plugins if required.

What is Jenkins made of?

Let's have a look at the components that make up Jenkins. The Jenkins framework mainly contains jobs, builds, parameters, pipelines and plugins. Let's look at them in detail.

Jenkins job

At a higher level, a typical Jenkins job contains a unique name, a description, parameters, build steps, and post-build actions. This is shown in the following screenshot:

Jenkins parameters

Jenkins parameters can be anything: environment variables, interactive values, pre-defined values...