Introduction to Jenkins

Jenkins is an open source Continuous Integration tool. However, it's not limited to Continuous Integration alone. In the upcoming chapters, we will see how Jenkins can be used to achieve Continuous Delivery, Continuous Testing, and Continuous Deployment. Jenkins is supported by a large number of plugins that enhance its capability. The Jenkins tool is written in Java and so are its plugins. The tool has a minimalistic GUI that can be enhanced using specific plugins if required.

What is Jenkins made of?

Let's have a look at the components that make up Jenkins. The Jenkins framework mainly contains jobs, builds, parameters, pipelines and plugins. Let's look at them in detail.

Jenkins job

At a higher level, a typical Jenkins job contains a unique name, a description, parameters, build steps, and post-build actions. This is shown in the following screenshot:

Jenkins parameters

Jenkins parameters can be anything: environment variables, interactive values, pre...