Creating Jenkins pipelines with Ansible, part 2

Joel Wilsson — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 19:52:00 GMT

The job-dsl and Pipeline plugins

This is a continuation of the previous post. For each project there are only two things we want to do.

Check out the source code.
Run the pipeline in the Jenkinsfile at the root of the repository.

This can be accomplished with the job-dsl plugin. It takes a definition of Jenkins jobs we want, and creates or updates them, as necessary. Somewhat confusingly, job-dsl itself needs to be run from a Jenkins job, known as a seed job.

The only reason for this job to exist is so that job-dsl can run, and every other job should be created with job-dsl. Yes, it is a bit mind bending, but if you don't think of it as a job but as a script which you run from Jenkins it gets easier.

In our case, every other job will look the same. They'll all be Pipeline jobs which run a Jenkinsfile after checking out a git repository from the same git host.

{% for repository in jenkins_git_repositories %}
pipelineJob('{{ repository }}') {
  definition {
    cpsScm {
      scm {
        git {
          remote {
            url('{{ jenkins_git_user }}@{{ jenkins_git_host }}:' +
                '{{ jenkins_git_path }}/{{ repository }}.git')
          }
          branch('master')
        }
      }
      scriptPath('Jenkinsfile')
    }
  }
}
{% endfor %}

Creating Jenkins pipelines with Ansible, part 1

Joel Wilsson — Sat, 06 Aug 2016 18:49:00 GMT

Introduction

Infrastructure as code, continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and version control (also known as source control management, or SCM) are good things. In this post and the next we'll automate the deployment of a system to do CI/CD in what I consider a proper way, where the definition of your build and deployment pipelines live alongside your code in git repositories on some server you have SSH access to.

We'll use Jenkins for CI/CD and Ansible to install it. Jenkins has been around for more than a decade, created before anyone had ever uttered the word "devops". Since it's old, Jenkins has a lot of features, most of them provided as plugins. The core itself isn't bad, and is stable and relatively free from bugs because it has been in use by a lot of people for such a long time. All those years have created a graveyard of plugins, though, yet some plugins are essential if you want to use Jenkins "properly". Want a timestamp for your builds? There's a plugin for that. Actually, there's more than one plugin for that.

Jenkins comes from a time when people thought it was great to have easy to use web interfaces to configure their build systems. The web interface gets in the way of infrastructure as code, where configuration is version controlled and changed by editing text files, not by clicking buttons.

Pipeline is a "new" feature of Jenkins 2.0, but it is based on a plugin which used to be known as Workflow. Using Pipeline we can describe how to test, build and deploy our project using text. That description is typically saved in a file named Jenkinsfile. We'll also use the job-dsl plugin to create the Pipeline jobs, but everything else will be done with shell scripts and kept as simple as possible.

Piecing things together (Posts about jenkins)

Creating Jenkins pipelines with Ansible, part 2

The job-dsl and Pipeline plugins

Creating Jenkins pipelines with Ansible, part 1

Introduction