A build server is, in essence, a system that builds software based on various triggers. There are several to choose from. In this book, we will have a look at Jenkins, which is a popular build server written in Java.
Jenkins is a fork of the Hudson build server. Kohsuke Kawaguchi was Hudson's principal contributor, and, in 2010, after Oracle acquired Hudson, he continued work on the Jenkins fork. Jenkins is clearly the more successful of the two strains today.
Jenkins has special support for building Java code, but is in no way limited to just building Java.
Setting up a basic Jenkins server is not particularly hard at the outset. In Fedora, you can just install it via dnf:
dnf install jenkins
Jenkins is handled as a service via systemd:
systemctl start jenkins
You can now have a look at the web interface at http://localhost:8080:
The Jenkins instance...