I'm working on a team that is building a RESTful HTTP service. We're having trouble with setting up a Jenkins CI job which will build the service, run it in the background, execute some tests, and then terminate the servers.
Specifics
The server is built in Node.js using the hapi framework and has some unit tests written in mocha.
The tests are written in Java using Maven. (Why not node.js-based tests? Because our testing dept. has invested time in creating a Java-based REST-testing framework.)
The build should fail if the node-based unit tests fail or if the java tests fail.
Our Jenkins box is run by a support team elsewhere in the company; our builds execute on a Linux slave.
Current Attempt
We've got something that kind-of works right now, but it's unreliable. We use 3 build steps:
The first build step is an Execute Shell step with the following commands:
npm install
npm test
node server.js ./test-config.json &
Second we do a Invoke Maven 3 step that points to the test pom.xml.
And third we run Invoke Standalone Sonar Analysis to do static code analysis.
This mostly works, but we depend on Jenkins' ProcessTreeKiller to stop the services once the job completes. We always get the warnings stating: Process leaked file descriptors. See
http://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Spawning+processes+from+buildfor
more information
Unfortunately, we've had cases where the service is terminated too soon (before the tests complete) or where the service doesn't get terminated at all (causing subsequent builds to fail because the port is already in use).
So we need something more reliable.
Failed Attempt
We tried setting up a single shell script which handled starting the service, running maven, killing the service, then outputting an exit code. But this didn't work out because the mvn command wasn't available on the command-line. Our Jenkins has multiple maven versions available (and jdks too) and I don't know where they live on the slaves or how to get at them without using the Invoke Maven 3 build step.
Ideas
We've toyed around with some ideas to solve this problem, but are hoping to get some guidance from others that may have solved similar problems with Jenkins.
Have the service self-terminate after some period of time. Problem is figuring out how long to let them run.
Add a build step to kill the services after we're done. Problem is that if the maven execution fails, subsequent steps won't run. (And if we tell maven to ignore test failures, then the build doesn't show as broken if they fail.)
Try killing any existing service process as the first and last steps of the build. Problem is that other teams also use these Jenkins slaves so we need to make sure that the service is terminated when we're done with our build.
Start and stop the node.js services via Maven doing something like this blog suggests. Problem is that we don't know if Jenkins will identify the spawned background task as a "leaked file descriptor" and kill it before we're done testing.
It would be nice if Jenkins had a "Post-build action" that let you run a clean-up script. Or if it had a "Execute background process" build step which would kill the background items at the end of the build. But I can't find anything like that.
Has anyone managed to get Jenkins to do anything remotely like this?
Some brainstorming:
You can turn off Jenkins ProcessTreeKiller, either globally or per invocation. I am not sure why that is not an option for you.
In response to #2, several options:
Post-build actions get executed regardless if build steps had failed or not. This would be a great way to trigger a "service cleanup" task that will run regardless of the build state.
You can setup any build step as post-build action, using Any Build Step plugin, or you can use Post Build Tasks plugin, the latter even gives options to define triggering criteria.
You can change the build state, based on RegEx criteria using Text-finder plugin
You can setup Conditional Build Steps. The "condition" could even be a result of some script execution
Related
I am trying to implement continuous integration using Jenkins and i came across below scenario.
I have a build, say Build A which is configured to run every 1 hour. This job require another process ( independant background java process ). But what happens is sometimes this background job will not respond or we have to restart the job in order to complete the Build A without any exceptions. If the process is down, we will get console exceptions and build will fail.
I have found a solution for this.
Abort the current Build A and start Build B.
Trigger Build A after build B is success.
But
What i am looking for is, if there is a console exception, pause this build and trigger Build B which will restart the process and I should be able to resume Build A when the build B is success.
There is no easy way known to do that in Jenkins. It would be much easier to start (and possibly restart) the fixture process from the build itself. Perhaps even integrate it into your build/test tool so the CI job can be easily replicated or reproduced locally.
I've got a Jenkins job that is intended to do the following:
Build a project and deploy it to a test server
Run tests
If the tests fail, roll back the server to the previous version
If the tests succeed, update the version in our source control system
Because we have a single test server, we need to ensure that Jenkins is only running a single version of this job at a time. Unfortunately, we can't seem to find a way to run a job on failure and keep the upstream job from executing while the downstream job is running.
Is there an easy way to do this? Is there a better way?
The Jenkins Post Build Task allows you to run tasks in a job after failure. Rolling the server back sounds more like a task than a job, so that might suit.
Otherwise, there are a couple of plugins that allow for more complex pipelining features. The Pipeline Plugin seems to be the most popular at the moment.
In job configuration, under Advanced Project Options (just before the SCM part), click the Advanced... button. You can now chose to Block build when upstream/downstream is executing
As for running conditional steps on failure:
- Use Post Build Tasks as Paul suggested, or
- Configure logic using Conditional Build steps
I am using Jenkins for integration testing.
Just to give the context. At the moment I have a separate build server which produces the build daily and Jenkins is not used as the build server. The build server executes the unit testing in my case.
When build process is complete it invokes the Jenkins job. In that job Jenkins start to deploy the build into the Virtual machine. I have a script for doing this.
Followed to that my plan is to run several scripts for doing the end-to-end testing.
Now I have several question in this regard:
How to parallelize the execution of the end-to-end tests?
As I am adding scripts after script I am getting worried how manageable it will be?
I am always using the web interface for adding and changing the scripts. How to do this from the command line?
Any ideas for a good tutorial? Any pointers from all of you? Thanks!
Looks like Build Flow Plugin is what I need.
https://github.com/jenkinsci/build-flow-plugin
You might want to try and see if you can use the Build Pipeline plugin before build flow. Much better visualization of what is going on, less scripting.
I link Build and deploy jobs in one sequence and then have unit and integration test jobs linked separately off the build job. You can then use Fail The Build plugin to have downstream jobs fail upstream ones.
I would like to use Jenkins for continues testing. Job scenario should look like: 1. connect to svn, call scripts to check-out repo, build and run test. Test will e.g. check if numbers in some output file are same as in reference file. All scripts are in python. The question is - how to force Jenkins to indicate job as "Fail" when numbers in files are different?
Thanks in advance
Typically you would use Jenkins a little differently. It is possible to do exactly what you want but Jenkins and python can eliminate some work for you.
First, Jenkins has the capability to check out stuff from various version control systems, including Subversion. This is the usual way to use Jenkins. When you set up a job, you tell the address of your version control repository and after that you configure the steps to execute after the files have been checked out.
Second, you should use the python test framework http://docs.python.org/library/unittest.html to write your tests. Then you can use e.g. nosetests utility to run the tests. Nosetests can even create test reports in xml format and Jenkins can read the reports and show you which tests failed and why they failed (if the report includes that information.)
But to answer your question: If you exit the build step with non-zero exit code, Jenkins will interpret that to mean the build failed and it will mark that build with a red ball.
Jenkins can mark builds as stable (green), unstable (yellow) and failed (red). If the build step exits with non-zero exit code, the build has failed. If the build step exits with zero, Jenkins can be configured to look for test report files. If the test reports have failed tests, the build will be unstable. If all the tests have passed, the build is stable.
Usually people use the failed (red) to indicate a fatal problem in the test (e.g. failure to install the software that should be tested) and then use test reports to indicate unstable or stable build.
I have a Jenkins job which compiles and publishes our Java project to a JBoss server. Obviously, the server takes time to start and deploy the new code. I have a second Jenkins job that runs Selenium tests against the running JBoss instance.
I would like to make the second (Selenium) job be performed automatically as a post-build action from the first job (I have already done this), but I want it to be delayed by, say, 2 minutes. The amount of delay time isn't important, but I can't find anywhere that describes how to delay the start of a post-build job. How would I accomplish this?
In the advanced project options of a project configuration, you can set a "quiet period" that does exactly that. Jenkins will wait the specified amount of time after a build has been triggered before actually starting the build.
Alternatively, you could have the JBoss server trigger the build (e.g. by calling a URL) once it's up and running. The advantage of that is what it would take care of cases where the JBoss server doesn't start for some reason.
You might also want to have a look at the Parameterized Trigger Plugin which allows you to run builds of other projects as build steps. This way you could run the Selenium tests as part of the original job and fail if those tests fail.