My former web developer setup my site so that it uses Jenkins and GitHub. I understand the very basics of GitHub and even less of Jenkins. But in theory, when I make minor text changes to my website, can't GitHub manage the process of pushing those changes to the server? Or is there some good reason that Jenkins is also involved?
Thank you.
Yes. It's not a must but using both Jenkins and Github will make your life easy. Github and Jenkins are two tools that help you to do different functions.
Github will mainly help you to manage your codebase, resolve conflicts, etc. So it will basically behave as a repository. You can commit your changes and get other's updates and always be up to date. There are tons of other advantages but I'll keep it simple for understanding purpose.
Jenkins is an open-source automation server. In your case, you can automate the product building. For example if you have a test environment or even when you deploy the changes t live, you can do all that with just a click. And you can separately build tests and live environments and With concepts like pipeline, you can even integrate the building with tests, etc.
But if you are talking about your local environment, yes git is enough because you can build the project manually. but in production have git and jenkins both will be a handy option.
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CICD Process with Jenkins, Bitbucket, SSDT(SQL Server Data Tools).
Please list out the steps to perform CICD Process.
Including what plugins i need to install in Jenkins for SSDT(SSIS-ISPAC file) or SQL Database Solution(DAPAC file)
This question is very broad and as with all the stuff related to databases the best answer would be "it depends". As far as I know that there is no proper plugins either for Jenkins nor for Bitbucket that work with SSDT very well so you'll need to implement all your actions by yourself.
It will depend on your system how the pipeline should look like. There are a lot of questions that you'll need to answer first but without knowing your exact situation it is very hard to suggest you something specific. Example questions:
How many environments do you have?
Do you have tests?
Can somebody change the state of the destination database manually, passing the CI/CD pipeline?
Will you run publish on every commit?
Do you trust what SSDT will decide how to publish database? (Mostly people would like to preview the script that would be executed on prod)
Then after answering these questions you'll might know what will you need. After that you need prepare the proper publish script, exclude/ignore/add object types you'd like to deploy and use MSBuild.exe and SQLPackage.exe command line utilities. You'll run these utilities with specific set of arguments and paths to the publish configs, DACPACs, etc. Bamboo and Jenkins supports command line commands for that.
I want to setup a CI and CD processes for a React App for the company I'm working for, the following technologies are used:
React for frontend
Flask for backend
Docker
GitHub for source control management
currently we are using a script to build the app and than deploy it manually to AWS S3 bucket, I've read some article and watched tutorials and almost all of them cover Java based project and use Maven as a build tool to package the project before deploying.
appreciate if you could help.
I agree that the question is a bit broad but here but generally speaking you should ave a different CI pipeline for your frontend and backend application.
The implications of this are many since this will allow you to:
To use different release cycles for your backend/frontend application
Reduced build time
You might however at some point run an integration step to make sure everything holds together. Generally speaking your pipeline should look like (this should run on every commit):
Also make sure you choose a CI/CD tool that doesn't get in your way and that's flexible enough (i.e: GitLab, Jenkins).
Build docker image
Linter (to ensure a minimum code formatting and quality)
Unit Testing
Code coverage (Code coverage perse it's a bit useless but combined with how it evolves and enforcing a minimum % might help with quality)
Functional testing (this makes more sense for your backend stack if it uses a database for instance ...)
If everything passes then push to DockerHub
Deploy the recently built image to the corresponding environment. Example merging to develop implies deployment to your staging environment
This is a not related to code fix, but a general approach for test automation.
I have a test automation written in javascript which runs perfectly on my machine as well as my local jenkins.
Now, i want to use my company's server(centOS) and jenkins so that it is accessible to everyone in my organization.
Issue: nodejs version in company's server need update to run my automation, but server team wont do it since they are not sure if any other functionality used be other teams may start to break because of the upgrade.
Have you faced this situation. Do you have different servers for core code and automation scripts. Please suggest.
This is a complex situation that really depends on many variables. I would recommend using an agent that contains the proper version of Nodejs. With this solution you can leave the current build server how it is but you can also use the exact version of node you need. This will require an extra server/VM with the Jenkins slave software but this will remove the need to change the master server.
The solution my company went with is using Jenkins 2.x with Declarative pipelines and ephemeral Docker containers for builds. This allows you to use any Docker image such as the official Node image. You can pin a version and build it with that. With this there is no need to worry about the version on the server. Jenkins Master doesn't even need to actually build.
I am using Vagrant to provide a 'synchronised' and standardised development/test/uat/staging and production environments.
I am now looking at how to standardise my CI build process. I like the look of Jenkins but I am confused as to what the best way to deploy it is. Should I have it deployed in a stand-alone CI box or install it on all the various environments?
I guess I am a little confused here. Any help much appreciated, Thanks
The standard approach is a stand-alone CI server shared by the development team. This common server (at a well known URL) provides the development dashboard for a team and the only authorized way to publish into the release repository (Developers not allowed to publish directly)
You could go for extra credit and also setup an instance of Sonar which in my opinion is much better suited as a development dashboard, providing a richer set of metrics and also serves as a historicial record for development.
Finally Jenkins is so simple to setup, there is nothing stopping developers from running their own instances. I find that with Sonar it matters less and less where a build is actually run, once the release credentials are properly controlled. In fact this attitude is important as it prevents the build server from turning into a delicate snowflake :-)
Update
There's a vagrant plugin for Jenkins which might prove useful in running your current processes.
You're likely better off running Jenkins as a shared stand-alone server.
However, I highly recommend that you set up your builds in such a way that they can be run on each developer's machine locally as well. This is particularly key with unit-tests.
In our setup, we have a shared Jenkins server that executes all of our builds using NAnt. Each developer also has NAnt installed and can run the build and unit-test portions of the build freely. Ideally integration tests could also be run, but we're not quite there yet and having them execute on the CI server still gives us that proper feedback even if it takes a little longer to get.
I'm working on my first rails app and am struggling trying to find an efficient and clean solution for doing automated checkouts and deployments.
So far I've looked at both CruiseControl.rb (having been familiar with CruiseControl.NET) and Capistrano. Unfortunately, unless I'm missing something, each one of them only does about half of what I want (with each one doing a different half).
For what I've seen so far:
CruiseControl
Strengths
Automated builds on repository checkouts upon commit
Also runs unit/functional tests and reports back
Weaknesses
No built-in deployment mechanisms (best I can find so far is writing your own bash scripts)
Capistrano
Strengths
Built for deployments
Weaknesses
Has to be kicked off via a command (i.e. doesn't do automated checkouts upon commit)
I've found ways that I can string the two together -- i.e. have CruiseControl ping the repository for changes, do a checkout upon commit, run the tests, etc. and then make a call to Capistrano when finished to do the deployment (even though Capistrano is also going to do a repository checkout).
Basically, when all is said and done, I'd like to have three projects set up:
Dev: Checkout/Deployment is entirely no touch. When someone commits a file, something checks it out, runs the tests, deploys the changes, and reports back
Stage: Checkout/Deployment requires a button click
Prod: Button click does either a tagged check out or moves the files from stage
I have this working with a combination of CruiseControl.NET and MSBuild in the .NET world, and it was fairly straightforward. I would guess this is also a common pattern in the ruby deployment world, but I could easily be mistaken.
I would give Hudson a try (free and open source). I started off using CruiseControl but got sick of having to relearn the XML configuration every time I needed to change a setting or add a project. Then I started using Hudson and never looked back. Hudson is more or less completely configurable over the web. It was initially a continuous integration tool for Java but has plugins for other development stack such as .NET and Ruby on Rails. There's a Rake plugin. If that doesn't work, you can configure it to execute any arbitrary command line after running your Rake builds/tests.
I should also add it's extremely easy to get Hudson going:
java -jar hudson.war
Or you can drop the war in any servlet container.
I would use two system to build and deploy anyway. At least two reasons: you should be able to run it separately and you should have two config files one for deploy and one for build. But you can easily glue the two systems together.
Just create a simple capistrano task, that tests and reports back to you. You can use the "run" command to do anything you want.
If you don't want any command line tool there was webistrano 2 years ago.
To could use something like http://github.com/benschwarz/gitnotify/tree/master to trigger the build deploy if you use git as repository.
At least for development automated deployments, check out the hook scripts available in git:
http://git-scm.com/docs/githooks
I think you'll want to focus on the post-receive hook script, since this runs after a push to a remote server.
Also worth checking out Mislav's git-deploy on github. Makes managing deployments pretty clean.
http://github.com/mislav/git-deploy