What is Jenkins? How to Use Jenkins for CI CD and Testing

Jenkins has a “Speed/Durability” label that allows you to maintain variables in scope for future usage while also allowing you to perform steps. However, if your pipelines spend practically all of their time waiting for a few shell/batch scripts to complete, it won’t help. Continuous Integration is the most important part of DevOps that is used to integrate various DevOps stages. Jenkins is the most famous Continuous Integration tool, I know you are curious to know the reason behind the popularity of Jenkins, and if Jenkins is easy to learn. I am pretty sure after reading this What is Jenkins blog, all your questions will get answered. We’ve already seen that Jenkins supports building with Maven; it also works with Ant, Gradle, JUnit, Nexus, and Artifactory.

I’ve shown examples where we specified a Docker container as the agent for a pipeline and where we ran Jenkins and Blue Ocean in a Docker container. Docker containers are very useful in a Jenkins environment for improving speed, scalability, and consistency. In the example above, the three stages are Build, Test, and Deploy.

Blog Categories

By default one node (slave) is configured and running in Jenkins server. We can add more nodes using IP address, user name and password using hire jenkins developers the ssh, jnlp or webstart methods. That lets you run multiple builds, tests, and product environment across the entire architecture.

By integrating a large number of testing and deployment technologies, Jenkins lets you deliver your software products continuously. It is capable of combining the various phases of the development life cycle, such as build, test, package, deploy, analysis, and many others. With a plethora of continuous integration tools available out there, Jenkins is among the top-ranked ones. Jenkins is an open-source automation tool developed in Java primarily for continuous integration. With Jenkins, developers find it easy and straightforward to integrate any change into software products. If you wish to learn Jenkins in detail, we recommend you enroll in our Jenkins Training.

Declarative Pipeline Sample

It composes a software application as a group of multiple loosely-coupled services. This type of approach is useful when you need to develop complex and extremely large software applications. Also, the microservices architecture makes it possible to quickly add new features to existing applications and bring them to market. Continuous development refers to the process of automating the development and packaging of source code and deploying it to testing and production environments. Continuous deployment is the process of automating the deployment of the source code to its desired destination. Along with continuous integration, Jenkins also supports continuous delivery and continuous deployment.

• Along with continuous integration, Jenkins also supports continuous delivery and continuous deployment.
• The user interface is web-based and comes with a REST API in both cases.
• For example, a command prompt code may be converted into a GUI button click using Jenkins.
• After testing, Jenkins notifies the developers of the test results and build.
• Jenkins X offers feedback for all pull requests, providing previews before pushing code changes to the staging and production environments.
• Kohsuke Kawaguchi created Jenkins (then called ‘Hudson’) while working at Sun Microsystems.

Jenkins, as an all-around orchestration tool, has many advantages when used for automation. For comparison, the following two Jenkinsfiles are completely equivalent. In January 2020 Kawaguchi announced he was moving to his new startup, Launchable. He also said that he would be officially stepping back from Jenkins, although staying on the CDF technical oversight committee.

Advantages of Using Jenkins

Although Jenkins started as a continuous integration tool, the current use covers the whole software delivery pipeline, including deployment. Jenkins automates the software development process with continuous integration abilities. Development teams have several members, so multiple commits might have bugs. With CI, it is easier to detect these bugs early before pushing the changes in production. Integrating every piece of code into one executable form takes place, known as a build.

Under this category we will be configuring how our build job gets triggered. For our purpose we will be selecting “GitHub hook trigger for GITScm polling”, this will allow us to trigger our build job whenever we push code to our GitHub repository. They
produce a lot of software to supplement their services and products, for that
they need to maintain large number of developing teams and software development
infrastructure. How do they manage all of these services and the constant
software demand that comes with it? Surely they make use of some kind of
breakneck technology to do this? With the help of a lightweight executor, the scripted pipeline syntax runs on the Jenkins master.

Why Use Jenkins?

This removes the testers’ burdens, permitting quicker integration and fewer wasted resources. This article explains how Jenkins works, its key features and use cases, and the functionality of a Jenkins pipeline. It helps us to not only
integrate all of these parts together but it also helps us automate a lot of
the processes.

Both are viable implementations of the pipeline-as-code paradigm. Both allow you to codify your CI/CD ecosystems from scratch using Jenkins’ robust plug-ins and shared libraries. In the “Test” stage, we would perform all the steps needed to test code, including loading test data, executing the test cases, and verifying the output. In the “Deploy” stage, we would fetch the tested code and ship it to the production server.

Builds

The original version of Jenkins is non-opinionated, making it an excellent tool for many uses. Jenkins 2 has since been released with increased usability, built-in support for delivery pipelines, and backwards compatibility with Jenkins installations. Once the Jenkins server is configured, you will be able to execute a series of automated tests and builds so that your code is always up to date and valid.

Jenkins checks if there is a change on source code with a defined interval. If there’s any, it builds the code and deploys to test environment. During that operation, it also runs the unit tests if there are any and reports them to the whole https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ team. In case a build is broken, it knows who broke the code with which check-in because it’s integrated to Git or any other SCM tools. CI is a development practice that ensures each new proposed change does not break existing functionality.

Available Plugins

Jenkins supports the complete development life cycle of software from building, testing, documenting the software, deploying, and other stages of the software development life cycle. Before releasing the build into production, Jenkins may deploy it to an environment that allows for any necessary user acceptance testing (UAT). To achieve continuous delivery (CD), these UAT tests may be automated using a tool like Selenium. Over time, continuous delivery and deployment features have been added to Jenkins.