My First Time Working With Jenkins

Introduction:

So I had a bit of spare time to play around with some tech and as some of you know, I’m freely experimenting with anything related to the world of DevOps. As a result, this led to me trying out Jenkins and just having an experiment with pipelines in order to understand how they’re created.

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Happy Reading!

So What is Jenkins?

To keep things really simple, I’ll place Wikipedia’s definiton below:

Jenkins is an open source automation server. It helps automate the parts of software development related to building, testing, and deploying, facilitating continuous integration, and continuous delivery. It is a server-based system that runs in servlet containers such as Apache Tomcat. Wikipedia

What Was I Looking to Do?

I was trying to see if I could build a pipeline and add stages such as a test phase and a deployment phase too if possible.

I’ve got plenty of experience with React JS so the idea would be to create a pipeline that could run the following commands:

npm i

npm run build

npm start

npm test

and automate the delivery process of this application.

What I Learnt:

Whilst the general idea of creating pipelines is simple (Just define the stages you need and slot in the various commands), there were definitely challenges.

By default, the examples I was referring to use bash instead of Windows bat. Unfortunately, my bat scripting isn’t the best and it was definitely time consuming to migrate between the 2 formats.

Secondly, the occurrence of race conditions (1 most notably between ‘npm run build’ and ‘npm start’) increasing the complexity of this task.

Other than that, the setup process was reasonable enough and it’s something I’d definitely delve into further.

Conclusion:

Jenkins was a fairly quick way for me to get hands on with creating pipelines.

Yes there were challenges and I was unable to implement the final “delivery phase” but scripting is always an exciting area and one that I’ll look to do more of in the future.

Final Things:

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this article!

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