Tuesday, April 7, 2015

How to build Platform QA Jenkins

So, I never have done a step-by-step to build the Jenkins instance that I have built. Knowing how to do it yourself might be important if you want to test jobs running in Jenkins.

First of all, decide on the host OS for Jenkins. I chose Ubuntu 14 for several reasons:


  • It's free.
  • It's easy to install on a virtual machine.
  • There are now incredibly easy-to-install debian packages that do all of the work of installing Java, installing Jenkins, setting up a Jenkins user, and starting Jenkins automatically on Linux. Updating Jenkins then becomes a matter of running updates like you would for other software.

Setting up the master VM

  • Install Ubuntu on a VM host, like VirtualBox or VMWare.
    • Give the VM at least 2 cores, 80 GB of disk space, and 4 GB of memory.
  • Follow the instructions here:
    • https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Installing+Jenkins+on+Ubuntu
  • Install the following Plugins. First follow the following steps:
    • Navigate to your jenkins instance.
    • Click on "Manage Jenkins"
    • Click on "Manage Plugins". (This is the url http://localhost:8080/pluginManager on your VM)
    • Click on "Available". Install the following:
      • File System SCM
      • Filesystem Trigger Plug-in
      • GIT client plugin
      • GIT Parameter Plug-in
      • GIT plutin
      • GitHub API Plugin
      • Mercurial plugin
      • Multiple SCMs plugin
      • SSH Agent Plugin
      • SSH Credentials Plugin
      • SSH plugin
      • SSH Slaves plugin
      • URLTrigger Plug-in
      • Windows Slaves Plugin
      • Workspace Cleanup Plugin
    • Restart Jenkins.
Next Installment: Add a builder