What is Jenkins?
Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration server capable of organizing a range of actions that helps it to achieve the continuous (and ground) integration process automatically. Jenkins is written completely in Java. Jenkins is a widely used application around the world that has around 300,000 installations and grows every day.
It is a server-based application and requires a web server like Apache Tomcat. That is why Jenkins has become so popular that it is monitoring repeated areas that arise during the development of the project. For example, if your team is developing a project, Jenkins will continually test your project compilations and show you the errors in the first stages of your development.
Using Jenkins, software companies can speed up the software development process, just as Jenkins can automate the creation and printing at a rapid pace. Jenkins admits the complete software development lifecycle, from the creation, the first, the software documentation, the implementation and the other stages of a software development lifecycle.
Become an Jenkins Expert With Certification in 25Hours
Why use Jenkins?
The pipeline plug-in we are using supports a general-purpose case of continuous integration / continuous delivery (CICD), which is probably the most common use of Jenkins. There are specialized considerations for other use cases. Java designs were the original reason for Jenkins. We have already seen that Jenkins supports construction with Maven; It also works with Ant, Gradle, JUnit, Nexus, and Artifactory. Android runs a kind of Java but presents the question of how to perform tests on the wide range of Android devices.
The Android emulator add-on allows you to create and test how many emulated devices you want to configure. The Google Play editor plug-in allows you to send compilations to an alpha channel on Google Play for launch or additional tests on real devices. I have shown examples in which we have specified a Docker container as a pipeline agent and where we run Jenkins and Blue Ocean in a Docker container. Docker containers are very useful in a Jenkins environment to improve speed, scalability, and consistency.
There are two main use cases for Jenkins and GitHub.
- One is the build integration, which can include a service link to activate Jenkins in every confirmation of your GitHub repository. The second is the use of GitHub authentication to control access to Jenkins through OAuth. Jenkins supports many other languages besides Java. For C / C ++, there are add-ons to detect errors and warnings in the console, generate compilation scripts with CMake, run unit tests and perform static code analysis.
- Jenkins has several integrations with the PHP tools. Although Python code does not need to be compiled (unless you are using Cython, for example, or creating a Python wheel for installation), it is useful for Jenkins to integrate test tools and reports. Python, like Nose2 and Pytest, and code quality tools like Pylint.
Get Jenkins With 100% Practical Training
What is Continuous Integration?
Continuous integration (CI) is a process designed to eliminate inefficiencies in the construction cycle by allowing developers to compile equipment code from a shared version control repository. CI also allows you to automate the tests so you can configure the system to automatically perform unit tests or integration tests.
Continuous Integration With Jenkins
Imagine a scenario where the complete source code of the application was created and implemented on the test server for testing. It seems like a perfect way to develop software, but this process has many flaws.
- Developers must wait until a complete software is developed for the test results
- There is a high possibility that the test results show several errors. It was difficult for developers to find these errors because they need to verify all the source code of the application.
- The software delivery process slows down.
- There was a lack of continuous comments about architecture or architecture problems, compilation failures, test status, and file release load, because the quality of the software may decrease.
- The whole process was manual, which increases the risk of frequent failures.
It is evident from the problems mentioned above that not only did the software delivery process slow down, but the quality of the software also decreased. This leads to customer dissatisfaction. Therefore, to overcome this chaos, there was an extreme need for a system in which developers could continuously trigger a compilation and test every change made to the source code. This is IC. Jenkins is the most mature IC tool available, so let’s see how the ongoing integration with Jenkins overcomes the previous shortcomings.
Advantages of Jenkins
- Jenkins is an open-source tool with a lot of support from your community
- Installation is easier
- It has more than 1000 add-ons to make it easy to work
- It is easy to create a new Jenkins add-on if one is not available