Introduction to CI/CD with Jenkins

This lesson introduces you to Jenkins, a popular open-source tool used to perform Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

We review the key Jenkins features and associated terminology. We then take you through a deep dive in configuring Jenkins to perform automated builds using the Jenkins web administration console in hands-on demonstrations, familiarising you with Jenkins and how to administer it. We’ll demonstrate features such as:

• Installing and setting up Jenkins
• Creating and configuring pipelines manually
• Creating and configuring pipelines using a Jenkinsfile
• Triggering build pipelines, manually and automatically
• Navigating downstream and upstream build projects
• Connecting to version control repositories such as GitHub
• Setting up build pipelines for Java-based projects using Gradle
• Recording artifacts and test results

Learning Objectives

What you'll learn:

• The basic principles of build automation as implemented within Jenkins and how they should be applied to manage and maintain building, testing, and deploying your own enterprise software projects
• How to install, set up, and configure Jenkins pipelines
• The key differences between Jenkins declarative and scripted pipelines
• How to manage build artifacts and test results
• How to integrate and leverage third-party build tools like Gradle, Maven, Yarn, Webpack, and many more within a Jenkins pipeline

Demonstration

This training lesson provides many hands-on demonstrations where you will observe first hand how to use Jenkins to build and release different types of software projects, for example:

• Building a front-end application which has been developed using the React Javascript framework, using technologies such as Webpack and Yarn
• Building a back-end application developed using Java, Gradle, and Docker, requiring Jenkins to compile the source code, packaging it into a WebArchive file, and then finally releasing it into a Tomcat-based Docker image complete with Splunk-based instrumentation for logging and monitoring

Prerequisites

• A basic understanding of CICD, or Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
• A basic understanding of software development and the software development life cycle
• A basic understanding of version control and associated workflows
  

Intended Audience

• Software Build and Release Engineers
• Software Developers
• DevOps Practitioners

Resources

The following GitHub repo contains sample Jenkins configurations used within the provided demonstrations:

• https://github.com/cloudacademy/jenkins-cicd-intro

Supporting Documentation

The following supporting Jenkins documentation is available online: 

• https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/
• https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline
• https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/syntax
• https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/pipeline-best-practices/