What is Jenkins in DevOps
With the evolution of software development practices, tools and platforms that support the development process must align accordingly. DevOps is a set of practices that helps software development become agile and creates a straightforward process for organizations to implement in the software development life cycle. Owing to its flexibility, DevOps has become one of the most popular approaches adopted by software developers. What is Jenkins? It is an open-source tool that helps the DevOps team in continuous integration.
Let us now understand continuous integration: continuously testing the source code and ensuring it is free from bugs or errors by DevOps teams. While various continuous integration tools are available, Jenkins is one of the most popular ones. Jenkins is an open-source automation tool developed in Java primarily for continuous integration and helps developers systematically integrate changes into software products. Read more about Jenkins and how it helps build a CI-CD pipeline.
What is Jenkins in DevOps, and how is it used?
Jenkins is integral to DevOps due to its CI/CD capabilities. Continuous integration is a software development practice developers use to incorporate code changes into a central repository regularly. On the other hand, continuous delivery (CD) helps deliver the software application in short cycles to ensure that it can be reliably released anytime. With Jenkins, DevOps teams can:
- Allow developers to automate code integration: Jenkins can automatically build and test the project whenever code changes are pushed to the repository.
- Accelerate continuous software delivery by automating simple deployment processes (full deployment orchestration capabilities are yet to be introduced).
Further, note the following about Jenkins in a nutshell:
- It is a server-based application that uses a web server like Apache Tomcat to make it operational.
- It integrates multiple testing/deployment technologies to help deliver the software application on time. It combines the various development life cycle phases, such as build, test, package, deploy, analysis, and others, to ensure seamless and accurate application delivery.
- It is written in Java, it is open-source software, and it is free of cost.
- It is easy to install, flexible, and can accommodate multiple plugins.
Building Pipeline Visualization from code integration to deployment:
Pipeline visualization allows DevOps teams to visually represent the software delivery process, from code integration to deployment. This step provides a clear and intuitive representation of the software delivery process, supporting teams and making it easier for teams to understand and manage the process.
This step is customizable, and teams can tweak it to their needs. For instance, this visualization process can be customized to show the status of each stage of the delivery process, from code integration to testing to deployment. Teams can thus identify issues and bottlenecks in this process and get them addressed.
Test automation:
With Jenkins, DevOps teams can automate the testing process of their code by running scripts and integrating them with various test automation tools as a part of the build process. Jenkins supports a wide range of testing frameworks and tools, and teams can thus choose ones that best fit their needs. Jenkins can also be configured to run tests automatically in case of code changes.
Workflow Scripting to expedite software delivery:
Workflow scripting in Jenkins can help teams script their workflows, standardize them, and ensure that each delivery process is consistent and predictable.
Jenkins supports the Groovy scripting language for workflow scripting, and hence, teams can leverage the power and flexibility of Groovy to script their workflows. It provides a user-friendly interface for scripting workflows, making the process easy even for those who need to be more skilled in Groovy.
How does Jenkins further add value to DevOps?
The various stages in the SDLC, like the initial development, build testing, and quality assurance, are followed by packaging, analyzing, and deploying. Jenkins in DevOps Jenkins integrates the different tools involved in running various testing mechanisms carried along the way, such as functional or UI tests, continuous integration, or continuous delivery.
Installing Jenkins DevOps:
Log on to the official site and download the zip file from there; once this is done, the file needs to be extracted, and a dedicated folder is used for installation. By default, systems show a true folder path before starting installation; the location may be altered in this stage if a location change is needed.
- Post the installation, the next stage is unlocking Jenkins in the following manner:
- Go to the path \ProgramFiles (x86) \Jenkins\secrets in the local PC.
- Open the file initialAdminPassword to obtain the secret password.
- Enter passwords and go to the next screen to select the plugins needed for Jenkins DevOps.
- Once the ‘Next’ option is clicked, it is necessary to choose the admin username and other credentials. Once this is saved, the Jenkins DevOps installation process is complete. Post-installation, one can change the port number if needed (The default is usually 8080).
Why choose Jenkins DevOps?
Jenkins in DevOps helps efficiently handle multiple downstream issues and test them simultaneously in the case of massive deployments. Jenkins DevOps model automates this process as every piece of merged code is mainly at a production-ready stage at any point. Jenkins empowers resources involved in every part of the software development life cycle by giving them complete workflow control and effectively managing the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. However, several plugins may be used to maximize the functionality of Jenkins DevOps as per business requirements.
Together with enhanced collaboration, shortening the SDLC is one of the primary objectives of DevOps. Manual testing is much slower and is prone to cause bottlenecks in DevOps, calling for the need to automate the testing process. The integration of codeless test automation with DevOps and Agile approaches can be used to create automated tests that can run continuously, providing quick feedback on the quality of the application. Please get in touch with us to discuss this further and understand how ACCELQ can help.
Geosley Andrades
Director, Product Evangelist at ACCELQ
Geosley is a Test Automation Evangelist and Community builder at ACCELQ. Being passionate about continuous learning, Geosley helps ACCELQ with innovative solutions to transform test automation to be simpler, more reliable, and sustainable for the real world.
