Book Image

Mastering Jenkins

By : jmcallister -, Jonathan McAllister
Book Image

Mastering Jenkins

By: jmcallister -, Jonathan McAllister

Overview of this book

With the software industry becoming more and more competitive, organizations are now integrating delivery automation and automated quality assurance practices into their business model. Jenkins represents a complete automation orchestration system, and can help converge once segregated groups into a cohesive product development and delivery team. By mastering the Jenkins platform and learning to architect and implement Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment solutions, your organization can learn to outmanoeuvre and outpace the competition. This book will equip you with the best practices to implement advanced continuous delivery and deployment systems in Jenkins. The book begins with giving you high-level architectural fundamentals surrounding Jenkins and Continuous Integration. You will cover the different installation scenarios for Jenkins, and see how to install it as a service, as well as the advanced XML configurations. Then, you will proceed to learn more about the architecture and implementation of the Jenkins Master/Save node system, followed by creating and managing Jenkins build jobs effectively. Furthermore, you'll explore Jenkins as an automation orchestration system, followed by implementing advanced automated testing techniques. The final chapters describe in depth the common integrations to Jenkins from third-party tools such as Jira, Artifactory, Amazon EC2, and getting the most out of the Jenkins REST-based API. By the end of this book, you will have all the knowledge necessary to be the definitive resource for managing and implementing advanced Jenkins automation solutions for your organization.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Jenkins
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Choosing a launch method


Jenkins true power lies in its ability to operate, and scale across OS platforms and architectures. Launching a slave node agent and attaching it to the Jenkins mater can be accomplished in a number of ways. Each method has its own use cases, benefits, and potential drawbacks. The one we select will be largely dependent on the target operating system, or environment. When creating a Jenkins slave node we will want to choose wisely. The Jenkins new slave node configuration screen provided us with the following available launch methods.

  • Launch slave agents via Java Web Start (preferred)

  • Launch slave agents on Unix machines via SSH

  • Let Jenkins control this Windows slave as a Windows service (using DCOM and WMI is sometimes error prone)

  • Launch slave via execution of command on the Master

Two of the most commonly used launch methods for slave nodes include SSH and Java Web Start. These two options are the least error-prone and offer the quickest implementation path. While...