Jenkins is a self-contained, open source automation server which can be used to automate all sorts of tasks related to building, testing, and delivering or deploying software.
Jenkins can be installed through native system packages, Docker, or even run standalone by any machine with a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed.
Jenkins offers a simple way to set up a continuous integration or continuous delivery (CI/CD) environment for almost any combination of languages and source code repositories using pipelines, as well as automating other routine development tasks. While Jenkins doesn’t eliminate the need to create scripts for individual steps, it does give you a faster and more robust way to integrate your entire chain of build, test, and deployment tools than you can easily build yourself.
“Don’t break the nightly build!” is a cardinal rule in software development shops that post a freshly built daily product version every morning for their testers. Before Jenkins, the best a developer could do to avoid breaking the nightly build was to build and test carefully and successfully on a local machine before committing the code. But that meant testing one’s changes in isolation, without everyone else’s daily commits. There was no firm guarantee that the nightly build would survive one’s commit.
- Jenkins Tutorial Overview at https://jenkins.io/doc/tutorials
- Write Maintainable Integration Tests with Docker at https://www.docker.com/blog/maintainable-integration-tests-with-docker/
- Jenkins on Docker Hub at https://hub.docker.com/r/jenkins/jenkins
- Cheat sheet: https://www.edureka.co/blog/cheatsheets/jenkins-cheat-sheet/