Jenkins is a highly acclaimed award-winning build and automation orchestration solution. It represents the cumulative efforts of hundreds of open-source developers, quality assurance engineers, and DevOps personnel worldwide. What makes this solution uniquely innovative is it is continuously updated, improved upon, and supported by this cohesively vibrant open-source community. It is through this open-source development effort that Jenkins has remained in the forefront of Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery practices.
The Jenkins platform bridges engineering disciplines, quality assurance landscapes, and business interests in an effort to connect traditionally isolated factions and transform them into cohesive engineering teams. Over the years it has vaulted in popularity and gained notoriety as an industry standard tool. Through its extensibility and collaboration initiatives its adoption rate has grown exponentially and now touts well over 100K installations worldwide.
I was formally introduced to Jenkins in 2008 when it was still Hudson. It was during this era that Hudson was just beginning to gain momentum by engineering groups outside of the Java development community. The software configuration management team I worked for was looking to implement a standardized architecture and delivery service solution across a large number of diversely acquired technology stacks. This began our quest to solidify a set of standards in build and delivery that could be applied across these diverse technology stacks and scale.
These experiences provided me with a pretty solid understanding of continuous integration, continuous delivery, build pipelines, automated testing, and the capabilities of Jenkins. By 2012 we were able to scale our implementations across a multitude of technology stacks of varying size and scope. All of these experiences would eventually culminate in me writing this book.
This book represents the amalgamation of a decade's worth of professional research, development, and automation engineering at numerous organizations with diverse technology disciplines. I wrote this book in an effort to provide a practical implementation guide for continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. With this book, my objective was to provide readers with some of the tools they will need while architecting, evangelizing, and implementing complete end-to-end build pipeline solutions at organizations of varying sizes and engineering topologies.
Chapter 1, Setup and Configuration of Jenkins, aims to teach reader how to manage instances of Jenkins of any size or scale. This is not an easy feat because Jenkins is highly diverse and supports almost any platform. You will learn about the initial setup, backup strategies, configuration techniques, best practices, and how to horizontally scale and properly manage the service.
Chapter 2, Distributed Builds – Master/Slave Mode, provides you with a complete guide on how to set up distributed build solutions and slave agents. This is a critical implementation and helps you understand when Jenkins needs to expand and support larger audiences and more diverse technology stacks.
In Chapter 3, Creating Views and Jobs in Jenkins, and Chapter 4, Managing Views and Jobs in Jenkins, we aim at documenting the knobs and dials that Jenkins provides on the dashboard, and the contained views and jobs. This is fundamental Jenkins knowledge and the goal here is to provide a solid understanding of the Jenkins platform.
Chapter 5, Advanced Automated Testing, talks about how to improve quality assurance efficiency. It teaches you how to architect and implement automated testing solutions that provide business value. This is crucial to any continuous solution because the pipeline must remain efficient and free of bottlenecks. Implementing automated testing is always a gentle balancing act. There is a trade-off between the time spent executing test automation and ensuring the rapid velocity of delivery.
Automated deployments are a cornerstone of continuous practices and build pipelines. Chapter 6, Software Deployments and Delivery, discusses how to implement scalable automated deployment jobs in Jenkins. This includes upstream and downstream jobs and how to manage them through naming conventions. In this chapter, we will discover some tips and tricks aimed at helping to keep deployments nimble and releases efficient.
Chapter 7, Build Pipelines, introduces the concept of a build pipeline and teaches you how to develop and scale them. Build pipelines are a foundational requirement of continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This chapter has been written in an effort to provide you with a set of scalable practices that can be applied across a multitude of technology stacks.
Chapter 8, Continuous Practices, defines continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. It provides a practice implementation guide for each. Jenkins has evolved and extended dramatically and now supports a complete array of continuous practices. This chapter aims to convey a set of defined implementation approaches to continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment with examples for each. Jenkins integrates extraordinarily well with hundreds of diverse technologies.
Chapter 9, Integrating Jenkins with Other Technologies, introduces some of the more exciting automation technologies, such as Docker, Ansible, Selenium, Artifactory, and Jira. This chapter shows you how to interconnect them through Jenkins. The ability to extend Jenkins through its plugin architecture is one of the primary reasons that it has become so popular.
Chapter 10, Extending Jenkins, aims at writing a set of basic how-to articles. It describes how to begin to write plugins, how to extend Jenkins with extension points, and how to manipulate the Jenkins system even further.
I hope you will embark on a journey with me in discovering Jenkins, mastering the concepts that surround build pipelines and implementing automation at scale. Writing a book is something I have dreamed of doing for many years. I hope that you will gain as much in reading the book as I have gained by writing it.
An existing installation of Jenkins is recommended (but not needed). Beyond that, we have provided examples in the following programming languages:
Ruby v1.93
Java
C# (via MSBuild)
JavaScript
Bash/Dash + Expect
Ansible YAML
This book is intended for novice and intermediate-level Jenkins enthusiasts who are in a unique position to implement and evangelize continuous integration practices, continuous delivery solutions, and as a result build pipelines.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "For example if the Jenkins system is configured to utilize a context path of http://localhost:8080/jenkins"
A block of code is set as follows:
<arguments>-Xrs –Xmx512m -Dhudson.lifecycle=hudson.lifecycle.WindowsServiceLifecycle -jar "%BASE%\jenkins.war" --httpPort=8080</arguments>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$Jenkins-Mirror>sudo su – root $Jenkins-Mirror>cat /tmp/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Recovery tab as shown"
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