Learning Jenkins

Dhanya Arumughom -

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins is a leading open source automation server written in Java to allow continuous integration. Continuous integration is the practice of integrating all developer working copies/code to a shared repository several times a day or at regular intervals. It helps in building and testing software continuously. Jenkins helps accelerate the software development process through automation. It can be used to automate all sorts of tasks related to building, testing, and delivering or deploying software.

An overview of How Continuous Integration with Jenkins work

In continuous integration, for every commit made in the code repository, a build is triggered. Once developers commit their source code to a repository, Jenkins will pick up the changed source code and trigger a build. If the build is successful, Jenkins deploys the build in test server and run tests. The build and test results will be available in the Jenkins dashboards. Automatic notifications can also be sent to the developer about the results. Jenkins allows you to configure alerts in several ways, for example, you can receive email notification, pop-ups, etc. Thus, Jenkins enables developers to find and solve issues in their code immediately and to automate testing of their builds.

Jenkins can be integrated with a number of deployment and testing technologies to achieve continuous integration. Jenkins allows you to watch for any code changes in code repositories like SVN and Git, automate the build process with tools like Ant or Maven, initiate tests in test servers like selenium and deploy to the production server.

Why Jenkins?

Jenkins is by far the most widely used tool for managing continuous integration builds and deliver pipelines. It offers more than 1,300 plugins allowing it to be integrated with almost any popular technology. Given below are some of the advantages making it the most popular tool for CI.

  • Open source tool with support from its community.
  • Easy installation.
  • Jenkins is easily configurable via its web interface which includes error checks and built-in help
  • With hundreds of plugins, it integrates with practically every tool in the continuous integration and continuous delivery tool chain.
  • Jenkins can be extended using its plugin architecture.
  • Jenkins can manage distributed builds. It uses a master slave mode in which the workload of projects are distributed to multiple nodes which helps in managing large number of projects, or to provide different platforms/environments for builds/tests.
  • Being built in Java, Jenkins is a platform independent tool, and hence portable on all operating systems-Mac OS X, Windows or Linux.

Learn Jenkins

Before getting started with Jenkins, you should have knowledge of the following:

  • Software development life cycle
  • Linux Commands
  • Git, Maven

Best Tutorials for Jenkins

We have collected a list of some of the best beginner level tutorials on Jenkins.

Best Courses For Jenkins

However, if you already decided to take a deep dive, here are some of the best courses we found on Jenkins.

For Beginner Level