Using Jenkins to facilitate continuous deployment

The world of continuous integration servers has come a long way in the last 20 years. One of the most popular systems is Jenkins (see https://jenkins.io/)—because it is free, flexible, and offers a huge variety of integrations and plugins. CloudBees (https://www.cloudbees.com/), the company behind it, also offers commercial support via a paid version. Your company might already be running Jenkins, in which case you may not need to do much setup to get your project to build and run.

We are going to use the Jenkins 2.x Pipeline project type, where a Jenkinsfile is committed to source control in GitHub and controls the steps Jenkins uses to build and deploy the project.

Avoid these traps

Before we set up Jenkins, we should make sure we avoid certain common traps people fall into when setting it up for the first time.

Avoid running Jenkins in Docker

Although you can use Docker to run a Jenkins server, doing so introduces...