Each of these states consist of events that execute in a sequence. Jenkins is designed in such a manner that makes it relatively easy to distribute work across multiple machines and platforms for the accelerated build, testing, and deployment. The backbone of Jenkins is the community and the community members have been instrumental in the development (and testing) of close to 1500+ plugins available in the Update Center.
Its extensive plugin ecosystem and strong community support make it an essential tool for achieving automation goals effectively. Jenkins lets you run a build on multiple machines simultaneously to minimize the total time it takes to run these processes. Jenkins can deploy the build to an environment where user acceptance testing (UAT) can be done before definition of Jenkins it goes into production. Jenkins carries out testing on the new build and alerts the developer if it fails. Initially, a developer integrates a new piece of code into the existing source code and commits. Now, the Jenkins server performs a regular repository check and finds and pulls the changes as soon as the developer commits the new code.
The parameters directive provides a list of parameters that a user should provide when triggering the Pipeline. The values for these user-specified parameters are made available to Pipeline steps via the params object, refer to the Parameters, Declarative Pipeline for its specific usage. Run the steps in this post condition after every other post condition has been evaluated, regardless of the Pipeline or stage’s status.
Jenkins Pipeline is another feature that enhances the offerings of Jenkins, as it lets you implement a Pipeline as Code using Domain Specific Language (DSL). A node is a machine that is a part of the Jenkins environment. The Jenkins Pipeline executes on a node block that is usually a part of the Scripted Pipeline syntax. Every job in the Jenkins pipeline has some dependency on one or more events. Continuous delivery pipeline in Jenkins consists of four states – Build, Deploy, Test, and Release.
They provide detailed help and information that is customized
to the currently installed version of Jenkins and related plugins. In this section, we’ll discuss other tools and resources
that may help with development of Jenkins Pipelines. Jenkins Pipeline is instrumental in adding a rich set of automation tools onto Jenkins.
To use Jenkins through a Docker image, you must select the SCM type in the first step. Then provide the URL and the required credentials to create a pipeline from one repository or scan all company repositories. Blue Ocean’s user interface strives to simplify the user’s journey by removing extraneous elements and simplifying the menu structure. Not only that, but it also provides pipeline visualizations with an integrated failure detection function.
These tools have a wide range of uses, and you can apply them to different parts of the development process. Jenkins’ continuous integration pipeline is incredibly powerful and inhabits several tools for different purposes, like hosting, monitoring, testing code, and compilation. https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ If the build does not pass in between tests, the developer is instantly notified to take suitable action. Now, Jenkins is ready to deploy the build to an environment that allows any User Acceptance Testing (UAT) before the release into the production pipeline.
Plugins can also change the way Jenkins looks or add new functionality. It is evident from the above-stated problems that not only the software delivery process became slow but the quality of software also went down. So to overcome such chaos there was a dire need for a system to exist where developers can continuously trigger a build and test for every change made in the source code. Jenkins is the most mature CI tool available so let us see how Continuous Integration with Jenkins overcame the above shortcomings.
Jenkins Tutorial focuses on the distributed architecture of Jenkins and also explains how to create a build in Jenkins. Jenkins follows Master-Slave architecture to manage distributed builds. In this architecture, slave and master communicate through TCP/IP protocol.
A pipeline is a set of actions that Jenkins will take to complete the CI/CD tasks. In other words, we can say that a Jenkins pipeline is a collection of interconnected tasks that need to be accomplished in a particular order. Design patterns and Java Annotations for plugins are used to specify how the plugin is created, how it extends other plugins, and how its user interface appears in Jenkins.
However, this can be changed by specifying the beforeOptions option within the when block. If beforeOptions is set to true, the when condition will be evaluated first, and the options will only be entered if the when condition evaluates to true. By default, the when condition for a stage will be evaluated after entering the agent for that stage, if one is defined. However, this can be changed by specifying the beforeAgent option within the when block. If beforeAgent is set to true, the when condition will be evaluated first, and the agent will only be entered if the when condition evaluates to true. The input directive on a stage allows you to prompt for input, using the input step.
Extra Tool Installers Plugin provides additional tool installers that can be used for the Generic Tools you define with this plugin. It’s a lighter weight alternative to installing plugins like Ant, Groovy, etc. when all you need is the tool installation definition for use with the tool step. The Pipeline Unit Testing Framework
allows you to
unit test
Pipelines and Shared Libraries
before running them in full. It provides a mock execution environment where real
Pipeline steps are replaced with mock objects that you can use to check for expected
behavior.
In subsequent sections of the What is Jenkins blog, we would look at the steps for setting up Jenkins Master and Agents. There is a strong involvement of the community which makes it a powerful CI/CD tool. You can take support from the Jenkins community, whether it is for extensibility, support, documentation, or any other feature related to Jenkins.
