Automation with Jenkins
There are so many automation software available in the market. What makes Jenkins different???? That is the big question.
First of all lets see what is a automation server. Automation servers are used in software development life cycle to automate different stages such as testing, building etc. Therefore developers don’t have to worry about these things. Once automation server is configured, it can carry out the defined tasks more efficiently. There are so many automation service providers such as Travis, circle ci etc. Some of them are cloud services. But Jenkins can be deployed at your server as you want. Most important thing is Jenkins is a opensource software. Anyone can create a automation server for their company without having to pay anything. It is very stable and fully equipped with tools and plugins to automate most of the work in software life cycle.
Jenkins has so many plugins for various tasks. As an example, it can be integrated with almost any source code management (scm) software. It even supports centralised version controlling systems such as SVN. We can even create continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines using Jenkins.
Lets see how we can create a simple cicd pipeline using Jenkins. First you should install and configure a Jenkins server in your local machine or in your server. You can refer about how to install Jenkins here.
Then you should download and install pipeline plugin in your server. Once its done you are good to go. First give your pipeline a name, then select pipeline from job types . Once job is created you can define how it should work. There are two ways that we can create the pipeline.
First way is to add the pipeline script within the server. Or we can create the pipeline as a jenkinsfile. This jenkinsfile can be kept with the project. All we have to do is add the repository to the pipeline. We can define the way how pipeline should be triggered. When a trigger occurs, it will fetch the code from repository and look for the jenkinsfile. If there is a Jenkinsfile in the project it will start the build using that file.
This is just few of the things that we could do with Jenkins. If we take the deployment stage we can deploy applications using SSH or even to heroku. There are plugins such as “Publish over SSH” to do these tasks easily.
If you are interested in Tech-ops you should tryout Jenkins. As for me, It is a very powerful tool.
