Jenkins From Scratch
By: Eng. Mohamed ElEmam
Email: [email protected]
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Jenkins
Jenkins is a powerful application that allows continuous integration and continuous delivery of
projects, regardless of the platform you are working on. It is a free source that can handle any
kind of build or continuous integration. You can integrate Jenkins with a number of testing and
deployment technologies. In this tutorial, we would explain how you can use Jenkins to build
and test your software projects continuously.
Why Jenkins?
Jenkins is a software that allows continuous integration. Jenkins will be installed on a
server where the central build will take place. The following flowchart demonstrates a
very simple workflow of how Jenkins works.
Along with Jenkins, sometimes, one might also see the association of Hudson. Hudson
is a very popular open-source Java-based continuous integration tool developed by Sun
Microsystems which was later acquired by Oracle. After the acquisition of Sun by Oracle,
a fork was created from the Hudson source code, which brought about the introduction
of Jenkins.
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What is Continuous Integration?
Continuous Integration is a development practice that requires developers to integrate
code into a shared repository at regular intervals. This concept was meant to remove the
problem of finding later occurrence of issues in the build lifecycle. Continuous
integration requires the developers to have frequent builds. The common practice is
that whenever a code commit occurs, a build should be triggered.
System Requirements
JDK JDK 1.5 or above
Memory 2 GB RAM (recommended)
Disk Space No minimum requirement. Note that since all builds will be
stored on the Jenkins machines, it has to be ensured that
sufficient disk space is available for build storage.
Operating System Version Jenkins can be installed on Windows, Ubuntu/Debian, Red
Hat/Fedora/CentOS, Mac OS X, openSUSE, FReeBSD,
OpenBSD, Gentoo or Docker or AWS
Java Container The WAR file can be run in any container that supports
Servlet 2.4/JSP 2.0 or later.(An example is Tomcat 5).
Jenkins - Installation
Download Jenkins
The official website for Jenkins is Jenkins. If you click the given link, you can get the
home page of the Jenkins official website as shown below.
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By default, the latest release and the Long-Term support release will be available for
download. The past releases are also available for download. Click the Long-Term
Support Release tab in the download section.
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Click the link “Older but stable version” to download the Jenkins war file.
Starting Jenkins
Open the command prompt. From the command prompt, browse to the directory where
the jenkins.war file is present. Run the following command
D:\>Java –jar Jenkins.war
After the command is run, various tasks will run, one of which is the extraction of the
war file which is done by an embedded webserver called winstone.
D:\>Java –jar Jenkins.war
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Running from: D:\jenkins.war
Webroot: $user.home/ .jenkins
Sep 29, 2015 4:10:46 PM winstone.Logger logInternal
INFO: Beginning extraction from war file
Once the processing is complete without major errors, the following line will come in
the output of the command prompt.
INFO: Jenkins is fully up and running
Accessing Jenkins
Once Jenkins is up and running, one can access Jenkins from the link −
http://localhost:8080
This link will bring up the Jenkins dashboard.
