As the title suggests, is there an option of running a CI before it is merged to master?
There are some features that I would like to test with some repos without merging my CI to master.
Similar to github actions where you can choose which from branch to take the CI if you are running it manually
It does so by default, was my issue with naming.
Related
in the software company I work we use jenkins to deploy to different servers, the way we do that is ever single branch from git repository deploy to the specific server based on the name of the branch and in the specifications on the jenkinsfile. But we are in the process of unification of this branchs in just one: Master, but how we can configure jenkins to catch the same code and deploy to the servers we are interested in, without changing the code? I think we should separate code from deploy, but the pipeline still have to exist in some way.
2 solutions come to mind:
I believe you may be using SCM polling to get the builds started. With git diff you can check what was changed and based on that start the specific deployment.
If you are running the builds manually you can parameterize the build and specify this way which one you want to deploy.
From experience you might want to set the pipeline so when you commit to the repository only testing and building is done and deploy is not done (or only on a test env) and the proper prod deploy is done only manually (and can be parameterized).
Jenkins provides lengthy documentation regarding how to specify which branches it will build from. https://plugins.jenkins.io/git/
None of that though answers this specific question, or if it does, I cannot seem to achieve this.
How to specify that Jenkins will use whichever branch is normally checked out when cloning, such as the default branch specified in Github
Does this even make sense or is this even possible?
EDIT: specifically what should go in the red circle to checkout the default branch in Github
Jenkins respects the default branch over HEAD. Also, it depends how you configure you Jenkins job if it's a mulit-branch pipeline then you don't need to specify which branch it should build, by default it will scan you GitHub repo and build the changes made on branch and it will trigger the build.
If it's pipeline job then you can specify which branch it should built by editing the job configuration on Jenkins job and specifying the particular branch name in the section Branches to build
I hope this is what you are looking for.
Im creating Jenkins pipeline for building and deploying our app.
I want to have the same build for the staging and production environment(buld-once-deploy-many approach).
Merging feature branch into staging branch would build an app for both staging and production, but it will deploy it only to staging bucket.
After testing, it would be good that developers merge the staging branch into master which will take the previous staging build and deploy it to production.
Alternative would be to have one branch, and devs would manually trigger another job on Jenkins that would deploy the build to production.
I want to avoid devs going into jenkins and triggering build, since most of them find it intimidating, there are also some nasty vpn configuration steps they need to go through to have access to Jenkins etc.
Would this be a bad practice? Do you have any suggestions how to achieve something like this?
Thanks
This is more of a devops question than a Jenkins question, but here is my take...
I can't decide if you are saying that you would re-build from the master branch, or only use the commit to the master branch to trigger a deployment of the original staging artifact. So I'll address both.
For this situation:
If you build an artifact in a staging branch, and test it. Everything looks green on the tests. So you merge those changes to another branch, re-build, and deploy to production.
The problem: Can you be 100% sure that there was nothing else in the master branch that is not different than what was built AND tested in staging?
You are risking the jello view anti-pattern because unknown and untested changes could sneak into your production artifact. It becomes terribly difficult to troubleshoot why it worked fine it staging, but now fails in production.
For the second situation:
If you are saying that you wouldn't rebuild from the master branch, then merging back to master doesn't buy you anything except a trigger to kick off a new build, because you are never generating an artifact from Master.
If you are going to to it this way, I think you could commit to a single branch, and then tag a release that is meant to go to production, then trigger off of the tag.
Either way, this seems like a strange pattern, and would be difficult to accomplish in an automated fashion in Jenkins. Somehow the newly triggered build would have to find the previously built artifact and deploy that to production.
Possible solution:
There are a few ways to solve this, but one of the easiest is to build once and deploy the same artifact all the way down the line, as you mentioned as an alternative option. But this would likely require some approvals or additional triggering in Jenkins.
If you don't want developers to have to touch Jenkins, then the more likely solution is to build and run your unit tests and smoke tests on the staging environment. Then when a developer wants to promote a build to production, they commit it to the master branch, where the same build is kicked off, and testing is all performed again, in addition to more advanced integration, functional, and acceptance testing. If it doesn't pass, it doesn't go to production.
Your initial tests in staging give the developer quick feedback, but don't serve as the official tests, which only run on the production build.
With a pipeline script, you could easily accomplish this with a single Jenkinsfile and single multibranch pipeline job with stages that are only run when the branch pattern matches.
stage ("Acceptance Testing" ) {
when { branch "master" }
echo "Do testing here"
}
I recently made the transition from Subversion to Git for all my repos at work. However, with svn we had commit hooks in place so that our Jenkins job would run for whichever branch was checked into. Now, I'm trying to set this up using Gitlab and there appears to only be one place to add a web hook. It looks like any time something is checked into ANY branch, the web hook will run. Meaning if I have a branch_A associated with jenkins_job_A, something could be checked into branch_B and the commit hook for jenkins_job_A will still run. Is there a branch by branch way to configure these web hooks? Or is there some kind of script I can check into each branch that will act as a commit hook? Or (my fear) is this feature not supported in Gitlab?
I guess you set up GitLab to do a post commit request to http://yourserver/jenkins/git/notifyCommit?url=<URL of the Git repository>? In theory this should trigger the polling on all jobs that are configured with that URL, and in the polling step the jobs should decide whether they should build or not. In practice this will unfortunately cause all jobs to fire.
We worked around this issue by moving the Job configuration into a Jenkinsfile and then use a Multibranch Pipeline.
As an alternative you could also install the GitLab plugin for Jenkins and use the Jenkins integration in GitLab. This will allow you to trigger the correct jobs when commits are pushed on a branch. The downside is that it requires a per-job configuration.
I've setup the Jenkins for the rails3 app to build the specs.
One can find many posts via google on how to setup the build trigger on the github push.
But what I want is to build the new remote branch pushed to Github.
e.g.
I've a repo origin/master. I cloned the repo, created a new branch, did some commits and pushed that branch to origin git push -u origin new_branch
Now I want the Jenkins to build this newly pushed branch on the origin.
If the build is successful, then Jenkins should merge it into origin/master automatically.
The Jenkins plugin has github, git plugin. But it requires to put the branch name. Instead I want to build the new_branch dynamically.
How can I setup such process?
If I remember correctly branch name is not a required entry. You need to test it, but I think if you do not fill it, Jenkins tests all new commit in the repo regardless which branch is affected.
But I recommend you do not merge automatically. You do not want that, trust me. :-)
It seems can not do that with only github and gitgub parameter plugin. If you specify branch_regex*** in Branch to build, Jenkins always build the latest commit in the bunch of branches that it saw. Must specify a branch in order Jenkins to build on the latest commit in that branch. I also see some answer with Multi Branch Pipeline but not sure how to deploy that way. There is no specific instruction at all.