Book Image

Extending Jenkins

By : Donald Simpson
Book Image

Extending Jenkins

By: Donald Simpson

Overview of this book

Jenkins CI is the leading open source continuous integration server. It is written in Java and has a wealth of plugins to support the building and testing of virtually any project. Jenkins supports multiple Software Configuration Management tools such as Git, Subversion, and Mercurial. This book explores and explains the many extension points and customizations that Jenkins offers its users, and teaches you how to develop your own Jenkins extensions and plugins. First, you will learn how to adapt Jenkins and leverage its abilities to empower DevOps, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, and Agile projects. Next, you will find out how to reduce the cost of modern software development, increase the quality of deliveries, and thereby reduce the time to market. We will also teach you how to create your own custom plugins using Extension points. Finally, we will show you how to combine everything you learned over the course of the book into one real-world scenario.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Extending Jenkins
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Getting started with Jenkins


As a Java application, Jenkins can be installed and run in different ways depending on your requirements, personal preferences, and the environment that you are running it in.

The simplest and easiest approach to quickly get Jenkins up and running is by setting up Java, downloading the latest Jenkins WAR file from the Jenkins homepage (www.jenkins-ci.org), and then simply starting it from the command line like this:

java –jar jenkins.war

The following figure demonstrates the use of this approach by running just two simple commands:

  1. wget http://mirrors.jenkins-ci.org/war/latest/jenkins.war:

    This command downloads the latest version of Jenkins from the main site.

    wget is a Linux utility that fetches files from the Web—if you are on a platform that does not have wget, you can simply save the link (the jenkins.war file) via your browser to a working directory instead.

    The URL is obtained by copying the Latest & Greatest link from the homepage at https://jenkins-ci.org/. Note that there is also an option to download and use the Long-Term Support release instead of the current, latest, and greatest, as explained here: https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/LTS+Release+Line.

    This is preferable for more conservative installations, where stability is more important than having latest features.

  2. java –jar jenkins.war:

    This second command tells Java to run the WAR file that we just downloaded as an application, which produces the resulting output that you can see in the following screenshot—Jenkins unpacking from the WAR file, checking and initializing the various subsystems, and starting up a process on port 8080:

    Downloading and starting Jenkins

This simple process is usually all that is required to both download the latest version of Jenkins and get it up and running. You should now be able to access the web interface at http://localhost:8080 through your browser and begin setting up jobs to make Jenkins work for you:

The Jenkins start page