Query on Jenkins - jenkins

I am new to Devops and started learning Jenkins. So could you please help me know, whether coding experience of any programming language is required to learn and have practice on Jenkins.
Thanks and Regards,
Srivatsasa

In my experience you will not need to program anything in order to perform task within Jenkins. You will need knowledge/experience with Maven, Ant, Git, SVN, etc, the particular technology will depend on what you want to do with Jenkins. When I use Jenkins I dont think that I have ever programmed anything.

To be truly effective and master Jenkins, you should learn Groovy. You can run any other types of programs from Jenkins, but any modifying or configuration of Jenkins will be done in Groovy.
That said, you don't have to know groovy at all to use Jenkins. You can do a LOT of what Jenkins can do and never write code. Just configure it in the UI.

Depends on what you want to do with Jenkins.
you can program in Jenkins in Groovy,Perl,Python and Bash and you can only perform simple builds ( mvn clean install )
it's all about what you want to do with Jenkins.

Related

What is the best practice for CI development?

We are starting to develop CI workflow for our systems in my company.
Currently we just making few basic tasks like build, tests, and upload to Nexus.
The tech stack is a Java project which build in Gradle and Jenkins makes our build.
Currently i'm working with some basic Groovy script to make what we need, but each time i'm copy and paste my updated code to Jenkins and running the job from Jenkins UI to see the results, and to me it seems like not a very good approach for developing such automation code.
My question is, what is the best practice to build and run Jenkins jobs?
Is it possible to run it straight from Intellij ?
Do we need to create a Jenkins project which should be saved as a repository and then deploy it to Jenkins machine?
Do we need to use some Intellij plugins in order to work with Jenkins?
More best practices are welcome :)
Jenkins has an API - so you can do whatever you want!
But in general, for small to medium teams it's better to use Jenkinsfile and let Jenkins pull code changes (or pull-requests) from SCM and trigger builds. You can also configure hooks to trigger builds if your SCM supports this (Github & bitbucket supports this).
If you are eventually pushing your artifacts to a docker image, I would highly recommend docker multi-stage builds.
If you are completely new to CI/CD stuff - Atlassian has a lot of good resources https://www.atlassian.com/continuous-delivery/principles/continuous-integration-vs-delivery-vs-deployment

Can I use Jenkins and Nexus without Maven

I am in a process of configuring Jenkins to deploy artifacts. I only need apache ant and java to create artifacts(both are available on the host machine) and no other external libraries. So, I think using Maven will make it unnecessarily complex as I have only 2 ant files. I want to keep it as simple as possible.
What I want to achieve is:
1. Trigger a Jenkins job 'A' to build the artifact and deploy it to nexus repository.
2. Trigger another Jenkins Job 'B' to take same artifact generated in in step above and deploy it to target environment.
Can anyone please help me to identify challenges with my approach and share some useful links to achieve what I have specified.
A short answer is Yes you can. Each of the component you mentioned can be used individually and can be integrated into your build pipeline. TBH, your use case isn't one off and can be easily done if you start here.

Do I need build integration scripts to automate Checkmarx scan in Jenkins?

I want to automate Checkmarx scan in Jenkins. Means it has to trigger new scan for every build.
For that, do I need any build integration scripts? If I do, where can I find them?
If don't, do you know how can I achieve it?
Thank you in advance and appreciate your help.
As far as I understand the documentation of the Checkmarx CxSAST Jenkins Plugin the plugin enables automatic code scan on CxSAST server, upon each build triggered by Jenkins. So you may need to install a plugin and his dependencies.

Is Ansible a replacement for a CI tool like Hudson/Jenkins?

Recently, in our company, we decided to use Ansible for deployment and continuous integration. But when I started using Ansible I didn't find modules for building Java projects with Maven, or modules for running JUnit tests, or JMeter tests.
So, I'm in a doubtful state: it may be I'm using Ansible in a wrong way.
When I looked at Jenkins, it can do things like build, run tests, deploy. The missing thing in Hudson is creating/deleting an instance in cloud environments like AWS.
So, in general, for what purposes do we need to use Ansible/Jenkins? For CI do I need to use a combination of Ansible and Jenkins?
Please throw some light on correct usage of Ansible.
First, Jenkins and Hudson are basically the same project. I'll refer to it as Jenkins below. See How to choose between Hudson and Jenkins?, Hudson vs Jenkins in 2012, and What is the most notable difference between Jenkins and Hudson from a user perpective? for more.
Second, Ansible isn't meant to be a continuous integration engine. It (generally) doesn't poll git repos and run builds that fail in a sane way.
When can I simply use Jenkins?
If your machine environment and deployment process is very straightforward (such as Heroku or iron that is configured outside of your team), Jenkins may be enough. You can write a custom script that does a deploy as the final build step (or a chained step).
When can I simply use Ansible?
If you only need to "deploy" without needing to build/test, Ansible might be enough. For instance, you can run a deploy from the commandline or using Ansible Tower. This is great for small projects, static sites, etc.
How do they work together?
A good combination is to use Jenkins to build, test, and save artifacts. Add a step to call Ansible or Ansible Tower to handle the actual deployment process. That allows Ansible to handle machine configuration and lets Jenkins handle the CI process.
What are the alternatives to Jenkins?
I strongly recommend Thoughtworks Go (not to be confused with Go the language) instead of Jenkins. Others include CruiseControl, TravisCI, and Integrity.
Ansible is just a "glorified SSH loop".
CI is not only the software running, but the whole process of how success and failure is handled, who gets notification, and how the change is merged into the target version control.
If we only focus on the software, CI is a reactive scheduler triggered by code changes, and triggering typical build-validate-release-deploy sequence of "steps".
So in respect of software, Ansible without additional "sugaring" is just a toolkit to run things, which can be those very steps, but it is not CI.
The Ansible (without tower) totally lacks this reactive nature.
If you want to marry Ansible with CI, you can.
Ansible tower is a very Ansible oriented scheduler, but if you need CI software, I think you not necessarily need it. Any CI app capable of running shell script would be capable to launch Ansible playbooks.
Yet unlike Ansible tower - CI tools know to display test reports of all test frameworks, trigger notifications, etc.
Ansible tower can make sense in a complex environment with lots of groups touching Ansible code... The truth is I haven't seen a single real reason to pay for it. But if a manager liked the web interface nothing can stand "but others use it" logic.
I suspect the concept of Ansible tower was in response to puppet enterprise.
:)

Custom one-click deployment

I really like the one-click deployment feature of cloudbees jenkins and would like to use it for my own deployments.
Since i'm not running on run#cloud, is it possible to configure a shell script as a way of deployment or implement a custom plugin to hook into this feature?
I have my own jobs that do the deployment. The easiest deploy jobs just call a shell script. Works as a charm and the jobs do everything I need. I can start them from a another job. They are super flexible since I can add as many parameters as I want for the deployment. The only shortcoming is, that I don't have that nifty looking link but I can life without it.
Depending on the tools that you are usign, for example in my case I use sbt and I think you can add a task on sbt to deploy to a non cloudbees server.

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