In 2021, When industries are running towards automation, adopting different DevOps tools to solve their industrial use-cases. In this race, Jenkins is one of the most promising tools. These automation tools not only automate the thing but also help in reducing the cost.
In this article, we are going to discuss the following things:
- What is Jenkins?
- What is Jenkins used for?
- How does it work?
- Advantage of Jenkins.
- At least one use case of Jenkins.
What is Jenkins?
Jenkins — an open-source automation server that enables developers around the world to reliably build, test, and deploy their software Jenkins is written in Java with plugins built for Continuous Integration purposes. Jenkins is used to building and testing your software projects continuously making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build
What is Jenkins used for?
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are the most important part of the DevOps world and Jenkins is the most famous continuous integration and continuous delivery tool. With CI/CD, industries can accelerate their development process. Let’s understand what is Continuous Integration(CI) and Continuous Delivery(CD) first.
Continuous Integration(CI)
In development practice, while developing any software developers need to program and test their code. Many developers are working on the same project over an SCM tool. They need an environment where they can test it quickly. As fast as they test, they can detect the error and solve that quickly. Using continuous integration tools all things become automate and as the code is pushed the testing begins.
Jenkins achieves Continuous Integration with the help of plugins. The plugin provides the ability to integrate with various DevOps stages.
Continuous Delivery(CD)
In DevOps, when you make changes to your product, such as modifying configuration or adding new features quickly and safely by keeping the code in a deployable state all the time, we call it Continuous Delivery.
Continuous Delivery makes deployments routine affairs. The deployments could be of an embedded system or an extensively distributed system. In this process, the changes in your code get automatically prepared, tested, and built. You do so by removing the hardening, testing, and integration phases that are usually present in ‘dev complete.’
How does Jenkins work?
Jenkins is a Continuous Integration tool. In the development process several different tasks including unique functionality in the repository, feature development, and bug fixes. Jenkins is useful in identifying the issue and fix it quickly.
Continuous integration has come from a programming model that is associated with the Agile methodology. However, the concept can still be applied to all those programming models that are iterative in nature.
CI often works in tandem with continuous delivery (CD) to deliver executable code to production at a much faster pace and in an automated way. Listed below are common CI practices:
- Regular code committing
- Build staging
- A build machine dedicated to the integration
- Continuous feedback
- Developer test categorization
Continuous Integration can be released at whatever frequency organization you deem appropriate considering your project and company. That is the reason which uses CI have more regular releases than those that use traditional software development processes.
Advantage of Jenkins
- Jenkins is an open-source tool that is extremely easy to install and use.
- It is free and available for all the platforms like Windows, macOS, Linux, and others.
- It has great community support
- It has 1000+ plugins to ease your work.
- You can also code the plugin and provide that to the community.
- It is build using Java hence it is portable with all the major platforms.
- Due to CI/CD, it detects errors quickly and that saves the time of the developer as well.
Even the minutest of change in the code could give rise to a new build. That is the reason many industries are using it.
Jenkins Use-cases
Android, Bitbucket, Server C/C++, Docker, Embedded, GitHub, Java, PHP Continuous Delivery, Python, Ruby.
Jenkins, itself located on GitHub, has several plugins for integrating into GitHub. The primary avenues for integrating your Jenkins instance with GitHub are:
- “build integration” — using GitHub to trigger builds “authentication integration” — using GitHub as the source of authentication information to secure a Jenkins instance.
With the help of the Git plugin, Jenkins can easily pull source code from any Git repository that the Jenkins build node can access.
The GitHub plugin extends upon that integration further by providing improved bi-directional integration with GitHub. Allowing you to set up a Service Hook that will hit your Jenkins instance every time a change is pushed to GitHub.
Going the other direction, the GitHub plugin can also feed information back into GitHub via the commit status API, more details here.
Authenticating with GitHub
Using the GitHub Authentication plugin it is possible to use GitHub’s own authentication scheme for implementing authentication in your Jenkins instance.
The setup guide will help walk you through configuring the GitHub OAuth side, and your Jenkins instance, to provide easy authentication/authorization for users.
