Jinx: a containerised Jenkins coordination tool

It's too easy to let Jenkins get crufty

Jenkins is a beast! Most of us run it from the UI, backing up the jenkins data folder and hoping that a restore will save us when we need to rebuild. We configure a plugin once, forget how it was done and then are frightened to upgrade because something might get misconfigured, so plugins versions get old and out of date.

There's no dev workflor for builds

You know what irritates me? That every new build's first thirty jobs are failed builds while the developers try to figure out the various breaking points in their build. Developers should be able to build their build on their local systems, and submit a working version to a production build tool.

The Solution is CI/CD

There's a better way: use YAML with JCASC where possible, use groovy to programatically configure plugins where it JCASC doesn't give you the right tools. All the state for configuring Jenkins is now in version control, allowing for a CI/CD approach where new versions of Jenkins trigger a rebuild, and a rebuild guides plugin upgrades.

There's a lot of heavy lifting to get that working

Jinx is a cli tool that takes the heavy lifting out of the dev workflow, so Jenkins can live in CI/CD.

• How do you get plugins to have autocomplete in your IDE, so you're supported in writing groovy to configure them? Jinx can inspect a running container, see what plugins you added, and get autocomplete working for intellij idea.
• Where do you put Jenkins startup code anyway? Jinx provides startup code and preconfigures your Jenkins with info about where to find it. Follow the patterns!

What will version 0.1 look like?

1. You will be able to generate a skeleton of files that are a sane starting point for a programatically configured Jenkins container
2. You will be able to customise those files.
3. You will be able to start/stop the container with this cli tool.
4. You will be able to build the container using this cli tool. dropping this requirement. Use docker build or buildah. The problem is that I wanted to build on macos without linux being involved; I don't think I can get there any decade soon, so I'll let docker handle this and revisit the problem later.
5. You will be able to generate intellij-compatible code completion for any plugins you install.
6. You will be able to generate a build on your local system (dev workflow), then submit that build to an instance of this container running in production.
7. You will be able to deploy to k8s

What will version 0.2 have?

1. Automated support for building credentials files.
2. Support with docs (comments) and preconfigured examples all pre-installed plugins.

Quick Usage:

Usage:

Global default file

On startup, jinx defaults to assuming the container can be called jinkies and that you do want to pull the latest version of images from docker hub. This container can be tweaked:

• If a file named jinx.yml exists in the pwd of the calling process, it is read in and overrides the default configuration.
• If the -j option is supplied like -j path/to/globalconfig.yml, then this file is used for the global config.

The options it controls are documented in examples/jinx.yml.

jinx -j path/to/jinx.yml -

Quick docs

jinx serve

jinkies serve start - starts a jinkies on localhost 😯

jinkies serve start -o hostconfig.yml - the -o flag allows the end user to specify any of the docker engine hostconfig options 😯

jinkies serve start -c containerconfig.yml - the -c flag allows the end user to specify any of the docker engine containerconfig options 😯

Examples of how these yml files are structured are in the examples/ directory.

Developers

Check out Developer.md for hints and tricks for getting started. We want your PR!