Jenkins Training

Jenkins is an open source continuous integration server. Jenkins is written in Java and was originally developed as the “Hudson” project before disbanding from Oracle.

Jenkins allows you to run your tests on a machine automatically every time someone pushes new code into your source repository.

This is very helpful because teams will always know if all tests passed and it will give them fast feedback if not. If someone broke something, you’ll know quickly. This makes deployment of software much simpler for teams. Again, it’s quite simple: Jenkins will run your tests after a code push and tell people if something failed. Developers are encouraged to push often in this scenario.

Jenkins also has another role: monitoring the execution of repeated jobs, such as cron jobs or procmail jobs. Jenkins monitors the outputs of regular programming jobs and notifies people if something goes wrong.

The operations that Jenkins performs can, of course, be done manually. The downside of this is that it requires more tedious and error-prone work from developers and usually involves more people like project/product managers involved and this creates a lot more back and forth emails between everyone involved. Allowing a piece of software like Jenkins to run, frees up everyone to work on what they do best vs. checking if code has passed tests.

Jenkins offers easy installation and configuration. It is installed with a simple jenkins.war file (a Java file). It is configured using a simple and user friendly web Graphical User Interface (GUI). Jenkins has a rich plugin ecosystem. Some popular plugins include the Global Build Stats Plugin, the Job Generator Plugin, the Disable-failed-job plugin, and the Embeddable-build-status plugin.