Introduction Of Jenkins: An Automation Tool For Software Development

By Author: Sachin
Total Articles: 14
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Jenkins is an open-source automation tool that automates software development parts in relation to building, testing, deploying, and facilitating CI/CD. Also, it keeps track of the version control system.

 Jenkins is a popular automation tool that is widely used in software development for several reasons.
 To automate the testing of builds.
 To detect errors in software development.
 For real-time monitoring of code and integrating changes into the build.
 Jenkins is very suitable for building CI/CD pipeline.

Features of Jenkins

 Free and open-source
 A good collection of plugins
 Pipeline support
 Easy to set up
 Easy upgrades

Advantages of using Jenkins:

 Open-source tool and user-friendly
 Easy to install
 Provides great collaboration between development and operations teams.
 Code deployment is easy and happens in minutes, along with the generation of reports.
 Free of cost
 Platform independent
 Rich plugin ecosystem
 Code errors can be detected ...
... as early as possible

Jenkins works-flow

 Jenkins checks for changes in the repository regularly.
 With changes defined, Jenkins develops a new build.
 Next Jenkins moves stage after stage in its usual pipeline.
 If any stage fails, the Jenkins build stops. The software then informs the respective team about it.
 However, if the stage completes properly, the code implements itself in the server to begin the testing.
 After the testing phase, Jenkins shares the result with the team.

Jenkins pipeline

The pipeline is a set of plugins that support the continuous delivery and integration of all the jobs in the SDLC and DevOps life cycle.

The pipeline is responsible for building codes, running tests, and deploying new software versions.

Types of Pipeline:

 CI/CD pipeline-
 Declarative Pipeline- It is a very recent feature that allows easy use of code & it's defined within a block labeled ‘pipeline’
 Scripted Pipeline- It is the traditional way of writing code in Jenkins & A scripted pipeline is defined within the node.

Steps to install Jenkins

 Install Java
 Install Apache Tomcat Server
 Download the Jenkins war File
 Deploy Jenkins war File

What is CI (Continuous Integration)

Continuous integration is the process of continuously checking the developer’s code into a version control system and triggering the build to check and identify bugs in the written code.

What is CD (Continuous Delivery)

Continuous Delivery is a process, where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production.

Continuously integrated (CI) changes are deployed automatically into the target environment after all the quality checks are successful.

Jenkins Master-Slave architecture

The purpose of the Jenkins Master-Slave architecture is to distribute the load of builds and tests across multiple machines.

The master is responsible for managing jobs and dispatching build requests to the slaves, while the slaves are responsible for executing the build steps.

This architecture allows Jenkins to handle larger workloads and reduces the risk of overloading the master. It also enables parallel builds, which can significantly improve build times.

Useful plugins in Jenkins

Use cases

 Code coverage measurement jobs
 General-purpose automation
 Reverse Engineering jobs
 Software builds jobs
 Sanity/Smoke/CI/Regression test jobs
 Web/Data Scraping related jobs
 Key Decoding jobs & many other jobs where software automation will be applicable.

Credits - Sachin Auti (DevOps)

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