Jenkins: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 2. Your First Steps with Jenkins

Introduction

In this chapter, we are going to take a quick guided tour through some of Jenkins’s key features. You’ll get to see first-hand just how easy it is to install Jenkins and set up your first Jenkins automated build job. We won’t dwell on the details too much—there are more details to come in the following chapters, as well as a detailed chapter on Jenkins Administration at the end of the book (Chapter 13). This chapter is just an introduction. Still, by the end of the chapter, you will also be keeping tabs on test results, generating javadoc and publishing code coverage reports! We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started!

Preparing Your Environment

There are two ways you can tackle this chapter. You can read through it without touching a keyboard, just to get an overview of what Jenkins is about. Or you can get your hands dirty, and follow along on your own machine.

If you do want to follow along at home, you may need to set up some software on your local machine. Remember, the most basic function of any Continuous Integration tool is to monitor source code in a version control system and to fetch and build the latest version of your source code whenever any changes are committed. So you’ll need a version control system. In our case, we’ll be using Git. The central source code repository for our simple project is stored on GitHub. Don’t worry about messing up this repository with your own changes, though: you’ll be creating ...