Unleashing the Power of CI CD: Streamlining Node js Deployments with Jenkins

Jenkins builds and tests our software projects, which continuously making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build. Jenkins-Ci is a platform for automating these integration processes and testing them for errors. It works with a variety of tools and technologies, such as Subversion and GitHub, so that developers can maintain a consistent workflow regardless of their technology stack. Jenkins-Ci allows developers to easily monitor the progress of their builds and tests and keep an eye on any errors that might occur.

Jenkins, a popular automation server, offers key features for efficient software development. It provides continuous integration and delivery, extensibility through plugins, easy configuration via a web interface, distributed build support, and robust error handling. Jenkins enables teams to automate their build, test, and deployment processes effectively. These features enhance productivity, collaboration, and overall software quality. Continuous integration (CI) is a software development practice in which developers merge the changes they have made to the main branch multiple times per day. When this happens, each merge triggers an automated code build and test sequence and if the build succeeds, then the code can be successfully merged and CD steps can be followed to proceed.

AWS CodeBuild​

The Jenkins Pipeline executes on a node block that is usually a part of the Scripted Pipeline syntax. In this section of the ‘what is Jenkins’ blog, we look at how to do user management in Jenkins, assigning roles to users, and setting up Master and Agents in Jenkins. There is a strong involvement of the community which makes it a powerful CI/CD tool. You can take support from the Jenkins community, whether it is for extensibility, support, documentation, or any other feature related to Jenkins. Jenkins is a self-contained Java program that is agnostic of the platform on which it is installed. It is available for almost all the popular operating systems such as Windows, different flavors of Unix, and Mac OS.

The above-performed UAT tests are automated for continuous delivery with a tool known as Selenium. The code is appended to the master branch to create a golden build if the test is passed. Jenkins is an open source continuous integration/continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD) automation software DevOps tool written in the Java programming language.

Continuous Integration Features in Jenkins

We’ll be using Blue Ocean for this guide, but most of the same concepts will apply to both versions of Jenkins. Jenkins adheres to a master-slave what is jenkins ci architecture technique to manage distributed builds. In Jenkins, you can easily figure out which commit caused the build’s failure.

• While declarative pipelines use a declarative programming model, scripted ones leverage the imperative programming model.
• Agents can run on different operating systems and depending on the ‘type of build request’, the appropriate Agent is chosen by the Master for build execution and testing.
• The Manage Jenkins page allows you to do up to 18 different things, including the option to open a command-line interface.
• Once you have picked your initial set of plugins, click the Install button and Jenkins will add them.
• Initially, a developer integrates a new piece of code into the existing source code and commits.

In subsequent sections of the What is Jenkins blog, we would look at the steps for setting up Jenkins Master and Agents. Like other open-source projects, Jenkins also produces two release lines – LTS (Long-Term Support) and Weekly (regular) releases. Jenkins is very good with releases, as stable releases happen every four weeks. Though Hudson and Jenkins were being developed independently, Jenkins acquired significantly more projects & contributors than Hudson. If the build fails, then Jenkins will notify the errors to the developer team.

Cleanup the Resources We Created

Have a good understanding of programming languages, operating systems, and databases. I have good communication skills and interested in staying updated with technology and learning new things. You can use both the web interface and the command line to load and unload plugins. Using these services, you may enhance Jenkins’ functionality and make it work with other programs.

This helps to ensure that the code is always tested in a consistent and predictable environment, while also enabling developers to keep track of the code changes and when they occur. Jenkins can handle running all of these tasks as part of a pipeline. Whenever Jenkins detects changes to your source control (either on master or a feature branch), it will start the automated pipeline, and run through each task you’ve given it. Some tasks are as simple as bash commands, other tasks may interface with an external service like Jira, Git, or your email provider. Jenkins is also fully extensible with plugins, and can really be made to do whatever you would like.

Deploy your API from a Jenkins Pipeline

On the flip side, it supports conditional statements that provide support for error handling, adding logging, and accessing environmental variables. When a DevOps engineer writes a Jenkins pipeline, they choose either to create in the scripted syntax or the declarative one. Design patterns and Java Annotations for plugins are used to specify how the plugin is created, how it extends other plugins, and how its user interface appears in Jenkins. You may also consider enrolling for DevOps Online Training to upscale yourself. Jenkins is designed to be easily extended via plugins – and over the years a thriving community has created a huge plugin ecosystem.

This makes it easy to install but caps resources to those of a single computer, virtual machine or container. Jenkins does not allow for federation across servers resulting in performance issues. Lack of federation can also lead to a proliferation of independent Jenkins servers that are difficult to manage across a large enterprise.

1. Installing the Jenkins server on Ubuntu

After the initial setup is complete, Jenkins-Ci can be used to manage builds and tests. Once you have configured your jobs, you can add plugins to extend the functionality of Jenkins-Ci. Plugins can be used to add additional features such as integration with other tools, or to customize the look and feel of the web interface. Additionally, plugins can be used to add additional security measures such as two-factor authentication or to enable distributed builds across multiple machines. Jenkins is a Java-based DevOps automation tool for continuous integration/continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD). Blue Ocean is still at the alpha stage of development, but the goal is for Jenkins users to be able to install it alongside the Jenkins Classic UI through a plugin.

Once we have added the Pipeline to the Jenkinsfile, click on ‘Open Blue Ocean’ link to run the job. Alternatively, you could also issue a Build by clicking on the ‘Build Now’ option, in which case you need not install the Blue Ocean plugin. Scripted Pipeline is a more traditional way of writing a Jenkins Pipeline as code. The Web UI of Jenkins is normally used for writing the Scripted Pipeline in a Jenkinsfile. Declarative Pipeline is a recent feature of Jenkins Pipeline that makes reading and writing the Pipeline code a lot easier. Unlike Scripted Syntax with Pipelines, Declarative Syntax helps in controlling different aspects of the Pipeline in a simplistic manner.

Project (Formerly Job)

However, it is important to remember that Jenkins simply automates development tasks and does not eliminate the need to write code or script for every development step. For more information on Jenkins, check KnowledgeHut’s Jenkins Training. The Jenkins project was started in 2004 (originally called Hudson) by Kohsuke Kawaguchi, while he worked for Sun Microsystems. Kohsuke was a developer at Sun and got tired of incurring the wrath of his team every time his code broke the build. He created Jenkins as a way to perform continuous integration – that is, to test his code before he did an actual commit to the repository, to be sure all was well.