Explanation
Jenkins is an open source continuous integration server. It boasts 929 plugins to handle about any sort of bizarre requirement you can throw at a project. In most cases, setting up CI or build servers is a tedious but incredibly important part of any environment.
Why Setup Continuous Integration
If your career has remained in small shops, you may not realize how easy something like this can make your life. If you put a little investment into setting up CI, you can gain quite a lot of time and peace of mind back on your system’s environments.
For me there are two big wins here:
- First: Continuous Integration setup means you can reasonably disconnect your developers from your deployments. In small shops this in interpreted as a loss of control, however I sell this to developers as a risk management technique. No developer wants to be held accountable for breaking production at 2am. Automate this process, hand the keys over to the people who want to wake up at 2am, and back away slowly from the smoking gun.
- Second: Continuous Integration is a positive feedback loop for good project maintenance. Once you have nightly builds configured, your developers will quickly learn not to check in broken code, and will use peer pressure to ridicule any developers who “break” a QA environment because they were too lazy to make sure their code built. Also, it’s nice to configure test cases to run before building, so, the “breaks” should be caught. If they’re not caught and something breaks, you know you need more tests.
Jenkins on Linux
In most cases, you’re going to find examples of Jenkins being installed on a linux server and being configured through it’s administrative website. If you’re deploying to all linux servers, life is easy. However, if you have even one server that requires any .Net compilation… well, life is not easy. You need this MSBuild plugin that needs the MSBuild dll. Surprisingly, Microsoft does not actually make a linux distribution of this tool (haha). If you rolled Jenkins on Debian or CentOS, well, you’re in a sticky place where you have to rely on WINE or MONO to hopefully execute a Win DLL. While this is a cute technical challenge, it’s also a waste of time in most cases that adds nothing to your project but hours and maybe a few stack exchange points.
Jenkins on Windows
If you run Jenkins on Windows, then there really are no technical challenges. Deploying to linux and windows systems is now doable with standard plug-ins.
With three plugins you can integrate a Git repository and deploy to linux and windows servers:
- Git Plugin: https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Git+Plugin
- Publish Over SSH Plugin: https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Publish+Over+SSH+Plugin
- MSBuild Plugin: https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/MSBuild+Plugin
Installation on Windows.
Jenkins is written in Java, so you will need the Java Runtime Executable installed on your server.
JRE: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre7-downloads-1880261.html
You’ll also need to install Git on the server so Jenkins can use it.
Git: http://git-scm.com/downloads
Get the Jenkins Windows Installer: http://jenkins-ci.org/
Outside of the plugins, there’s very few configurations you have to make. Go to Configure Security:
Click “enable security”
select “Jenkins own user database” as realm
select “matrix-based security”
and create an account.
Then add in whatever plugins you need.
There are a few “gotchas” to avoid frustration:
Regarding MSBuild
Jenkins MSBuild plugin requires .NET framework 4.5 to be installed if the Visual studio project is dependent on it (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/hh852363.aspx)
Regarding Git
The initial path is wrong. In “Manage Jenkins–>Configure System”. Change it to “C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\cmd”
Be careful when you setup your Git credentials on your job. Jenkins will automatically try your credentials without asking over and over. If you typo’d it, your account will get locked out.
Regarding Publish Over SSH
Server Setup is here: Jenkins->Manage Jenkins->Configure System
This is where you configure and add servers. These will populate the server drop down when you are creating a new job.
Summary
Just to restate; the point is not that a Jenkins install on Linux can-NOT handle running the MSBuild.dll through WINE or MONO.
The point is that going through this exercise is not always mission critical and that Jenkins can easily run on a Windows machine and handle deployments to all machine types now without the extra time spent setting up the above.