Jenkins and Build Pipelines-Part1
(Overview and Setting up the Environment)
If you want to know some details on continuous integration(CI) and continuous deployment(CD) this might help you. When you have developed an application and you want to integrate the changes to your software quickly into the deployment stage to get the actual feedback of the clients you must know the concepts of CI and CD. We can automate many stages of software development life cycle(SDLC) such as build,deploy and also containerization of application. In addition there are some cool features such as pipeline as a code which will be useful when we are running tests through the version control systems.In this series of blog post I will try to provide the details and concepts which will be useful if you are planning to automate your build,test and deployment workflows.
Most of the people who are engaging in DevOps probably have come through the term Jenkins. Most of you may have heard of it as a CI tool but may not know or aware of the capabilities of it but you may have heard someone saying about the features it can provide on CI workflows. There are so much of plugins and support available but you may not be aware from where to start the journey with Jenkins. I will try my best to guide you to start working with this amazing tool.
The simplest form of installing Jenkins is using a WAR file which is applicable irrespective of the operating system you are using.You can get the latest stable version of WAR file here. You can have a look on the Jenkins official page for detailed information if you are planning to run Jenkins as a Docker container. After proper installation you can go to the local browser and search for the URL http://localhost:8080 here if you have set the port number to some other values 8081 or 9090 or any other custom port you have to specify the port number here.If you want to visualize using a UI you can use the Blue Ocean GUI then you have to manually install the Blue Ocean plugin.Simply you can go to Manage Jenkins->Mange Plugins and select available plugins and search for “Blue Ocean” and install the plugin and restart the server.Plugins are almost available for every feature we want to have when we are using the pipeline.Selecting the suitable plugins for the specific tasks is simple and can be done within minutes.Now go to you browser and visit the URL http://localhost:8080/.You can see the page similar to below

That’s it now you are ready to use the coolest CI/CD tool and we can start to use the Jenkins server running on the local machine.In the next post I’ll introduce you to some important concepts we should know before creating the pipelines. I’ll try to keep the posts simple so that you can easily search for the actual content you want to know without wasting time on what you already know. For further references on environment setup and for usage with Docker refer the Jenkins official page here.

