Travis CI has a really nice feature, builds are run within VirtualBox VMs. Each time a build is started, the box is refreshed from a snapshot and the code copied on to it. Any problems with the build cannot affect the host, and you can use any OS to run your builds on.
This would be really good, for example, compiling and testing code on a guest OS that matches your production env. Also, you can keep your host free of any installation dependencies you might need (e.g. a database server) and run ITs without worrying about things like port conflicts.
Does such a thing exist for Jenkins?
Check out the Vagrant Plugin https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Vagrant-plugin
This plugin allows booting of Vagrant virtual machines, provisioning them and also executing scripts inside of them
You can run Jenkins in a Master Slave Setup. Your Master instance manages all the jobs but lets all the slaves do the actual work. These Slaves can be VMs or physical machines. Go To Manage Jenkins -> Manage Nodes -> New Node to add Nodes to your Jenkins Setup.
There is the vSphere Cloud Plugin and the Scripted Cloud Plugin that can be used for this purpose.
Related
I am trying to setup Kubernetes for my company. I have looked a good amount into Jenkins X and, while I really like the roadmap, I have come the realization that it is likely not mature enough for my company to use at this time. (UI in preview, flaky command line, random IP address needs and poor windows support are a few of the issues that have lead me to that conclusion.)
But I understand that the normal Jenkins is very mature and can run on Kubernetes. I also understand that it can have dynamically created build agents run in the cluster.
But I am not sure about gitops support. When I try to google it (gitops jenkins) I get a bunch of information that includes Jenkins X.
Is there an easy(ish) way for normal Jenkins to use GitOps? If so, how?
Update:
By GitOps, I mean something similar to what Jenkins X supports. (Meaning changes to the cluster stored in a Git repository. And merging causes a deployment.)
I mean something similar to what Jenkins X supports. (Meaning changes to the cluster stored in a Git repository. And merging causes a deployment.)
Yes, this is the what Jenkins (or other CICD tools) do. You can declare a deployment pipeline in a Jenkinsfile that is triggered on merge (commit to master) and have other steps for other branches (if you want).
I recommend to deploy with kubectl using kustomize and store the config files in your Git repository. You parameterize different environments e.g. staging and production with overlays. You may e.g. deploy with only 2 replicas in staging but with 6 replicas and more memory resources in production.
Using Jenkins for this, I would create a docker agent image with kubectl, so your steps can use the kubectl command line tool.
Jenkins on Kubernetes
But I understand that the normal Jenkins is very mature and can run on Kubernetes. I also understand that it can have dynamically created build agents run in the cluster.
I have not had the best experience with this. It may work - or it may not work so well. I currently host Jenkins outside the Kubernetes cluster. I think that Jenkins X together with Tekton may be an upcoming promising solution for this, but I have not tried that setup.
I'm new to Jenkins, and I like to know if it is possible to have one Jenkins server to deploy / update code on multiple web servers.
Currently, I have two web servers, which are using python Fabric for deployment.
Any good tutorials, will be greatly welcomed.
One solution could be to declare your web servers as slave nodes.
First thing, give jenkins credentials to your servers (login/password or ssh login+private key or certificate. This can be configured in the "Manage credentials" menu
Then configure the slave nodes. Read the doc
Then, create a multi-configuration job. First you have to install the matrix-project plugin. This will allow you to send the same deployment intructions to both your servers at once
Since you are already using Fabic for deployment, I would suggest installing Fabric on the Jenkins master and have Jenkins kick off the Fabric commands to deploy to the remote servers. You could set up the hostnames or IPs of the remote servers as parameters to the build and just have shell commands that iterate over them and run the Fabric commands. You can take this a step further and have the same job deploy to dev/test/prod just by using a different set of hosts.
I would not make the webservers slave nodes. Reserve slave nodes for build jobs. For example, if you need to build a windows application, you will need a windows Jenkins slave. IF you have a problem with installing Fabric on your Jenkins master, you could create a slave node that is responsible for running Fabric deploys and force anything that runs a fabric command to use that slave. I feel like this is overly complex but if you have a ton of builds on your master, you might want to go this route.
I would like to raise from scratch a build server for .NET applications using Jenkins, please note that i'm new to Jenkins CI.
Several Questions:
1) How should I decide on the build server specs? except for the OS which would be windows server 2012, how should I decide on the RAM and the CPU and HD space?
2) Should the Jenkins sit in the build machine or not, what is the recommended approach? I understood that the build server should be isolated from the Jenkins master
3) How do I decide on the Master/Slave approach, when should I use only Master and when should I use master and slave or slaves?
4) How would you recommend me to run the build and deployment tasks in the Jenkins CI, using NAnt/Python or any other scripting language ?
10x, and sorry for the igonrance :)
Responding to each in turn:
You can run Jenkins as a windows service (instructions here) and the machine can be a VM, so it doesn't have to be huge.
a) RAM and CPU: I'll put these together and will depend on how many jobs you plan to have running at the same time. The default number of build executors is 3 but can be increased as a global config change.
b) HDD: This depends on how many jobs you plan to have. Jenkins will checkout the source code (as well as the compiled output) to its home directory on a per job basis. This can get big. I would also recommend using the ThinBackup plugin to backup the Jenkins configuration.
Jenkins is the build machine. A vanilla installation of Jenkins is the master. In my experience you will not need a separate slave machine unless you're needing to do native builds on other platforms or have LOTS and LOTS of jobs. I've seen single masters running happily with hundreds of jobs.
Further to 2. above, suggest you start with a master and set up a slave later if you really need one.
As you have stated you are building .NET applications, you can simply install the MSBuild plugin which should serve you well. Builds for .NET applications in Jenkins are Freestyle builds so you will be using Windows Batch build steps often as well. This also is a great blog on Jenkins in a .NET environment.
I am using Jenkins for CI,
I've heard that I should have a dedicated server and slave for running Jenkins and building tasks, respectively -
is this true?
I can understand this as the server may not be powerful enough to handle the server itself and running build tasks,
but is there any defined technical reason for this?
Best practice is to have a separate machine for Jenkins-Server,
and not to use it for builds at all.
This has nothing to do with CPU-power or memory-resources -
A build-machine should have a predefined configuration,
and Jenkins should not be part of it.
(Jenkins requirements may even conflict with those of the build-machine)
You should be able to boot / clone / upgrade / restore / trash the build-machine
without any impact on Jenkins.
Of course you can settle for a single machine, if your resources are limited,
but if you are serious about build-automation - Jenkins should have its own server.
You probably don't need dedicated hardware/VM to run a Jenkins server because the actual Jenkins process (no builds running) uses very little resources. But it all depends on what you want to accomplish with your Jenkins setup.
Do you want to run continuous builds across multiple platforms for multiple projects? Then using a master with slaves is the only way to go. If, on the other hand, you're running fairly simple builds for just a few projects, then you only need one machine to run the builds and the Jenkins process.
You can configure Jenkins to have multiple builds running concurrently so if you have a quad-core machine, you can safely run 2 builds and possibly a third once you analyze resource usage.
At my last gig, I used a quad-core machine with 8GB RAM to run:
Jenkins running Selenium builds
VirtualBox VM with Windows XP
Two instances of Tomcat each with two applications deployed.
And the machine still had more to spare.
I am very new to CI systems like Jenkins.
I have a master Jenkins server running on Ubuntu. I have one Ubuntu slave (managed over SSH) ,which is dedicated to Android builds, having Android SDK and others already available.
My question is how I can tell the Jenkins master the path of android SDK on the slave server?
Go to Manage Jenkins -> Manage Nodes, and open configuration page for the slave node. Add environment variables, which will then be given only to that slave.
If you define environment variables which are used by default by the SDK, then this is enough. Otherwise you will also have to edit the job to use these (I mean, like in execute shell script build steps).
I'm not familiar with the Andriod SDK specifically, but could you pass it as a parameter to the build?