Jenkins is a powerful application that allows continuous integration and continuous delivery of projects, regardless of the platform you are working on. It is a free source that can handle any kind of build or continuous integration. You can integrate Jenkins with a number of testing and deployment technologies. In this tutorial, we would explain how you can use Jenkins to build and test your software projects continuously.
What is Jenkins?
Jenkins is an open-source Continuous Integration server capable of orchestrating a chain of actions that help to achieve the Continuous Integration process (and not only) in an automated fashion.
Jenkins is free and is entirely written in Java. Jenkins is a widely used application around the world that has around 300k installations and growing day by day.
It is a server-based application and requires a web server like Apache Tomcat. The reason Jenkins became so popular is that of its monitoring of repeated tasks that arise during the development of a project. For example, if your team is developing a project, Jenkins will continuously test your project builds and show you the errors in the early stages of your development.
By using Jenkins, software companies can accelerate their software development process, as Jenkins can automate build and test at a rapid rate. Jenkins supports the complete development lifecycle of software from building, testing, documenting the software, deploying, and other stages of a software development lifecycle.
What is Continuous Integration?
In Continuous Integration after a code commit, the software is built and tested immediately. In a large project with many developers, commits are made many times during a day. With each commit code is built and tested. If the test is passed, the build is tested for deployment. If the deployment is a success, the code is pushed to production. This commit, build, test, and deploy is a continuous process and hence the name continuous integration/deployment.
A Continuous Integration Pipeline is a powerful instrument that consists of a set of tools designed to host, monitor, compile and test code, or code changes, like:
- Continuous Integration Server (Jenkins, Bamboo, CruiseControl, TeamCity, and others)
- Source Control Tool (e.g., CVS, SVN, GIT, Mercurial, Perforce, ClearCase and others)
- Build tool (Make, Ant, Maven, Ivy, Gradle, and others)
- Automation testing framework (Selenium, Appium, TestComplete, UFT, and others)
Jenkin History
- Kohsuke Kawaguchi, a Java developer, working at SUN Microsystems, was tired of building the code and fixing errors repetitively. In 2004, created an automation server called Hudson that automates build and test tasks.
- In 2011, Oracle who owned Sun Microsystems had a dispute with Hudson's open source community, so they forked Hudson and renamed it, Jenkins.
- Both Hudson and Jenkins continued to operate independently. But in a short span of time, Jenkins acquired a lot of projects and contributors while Hudson remained with only 32 projects. With time, Jenkins became more popular, and Hudson is not maintained anymore.
Real-world case study of Continuous Integration
I am sure all of you aware of the old phone Nokia. Nokia used to implement a procedure called nightly build. After multiple commits from diverse developers during the day, the software built every night. Since the software was built only once a day, it’s a huge pain to isolate, identify, and fix the errors in a large codebase.
Later, they adopted the Continuous Integration approach. The software was built and tested as soon as a developer committed code. If any error is detected, the respective developer can quickly fix the defect.
Jenkins Plugins
By default, Jenkins comes with a limited set of features. If you want to integrate your Jenkins installation with version control tools like Git, then you need to install plugins related to Git. In fact, for integration with tools like Maven, Amazon EC2, you need to install respective plugins in your Jenkins.
Advantages of using Jenkins
- Jenkins is being managed by the community which is very open. Every month, they hold public meetings and take inputs from the public for the development of the Jenkins project.
- So far around 280 tickets are closed, and the project publishes a stable release every three months.
- As technology grows, so does Jenkins. So far Jenkins has around 320 plugins published in its plugins database. With plugins, Jenkins becomes even more powerful and feature-rich.
- Jenkins also supports cloud-based architecture so that you can deploy Jenkins in cloud-based platforms.
- The reason why Jenkins became popular is that it was created by a developer for developers.
Disadvantages of using Jenkins
Though Jenkins is a very powerful tool, it has its flaws.
- Its interface is outdated and not user friendly compared to current UI trends.
- Though Jenkins is loved by many developers, it’s not that easy to maintain it because Jenkins runs on a server and requires some skills as a server administrator to monitor its activity.
- One of the reasons why many people don’t implement Jenkins is due to its difficulty in installing and configuring Jenkins.
- Continuous integrations regularly break due to some small setting changes. Continuous integration will be paused and therefore requires some developer attention.
So In this part, we are talking about the brief of Jenkins. So In the next Part, we will discuss How to Download & Install Jenkins on Windows.
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