Continuous integration with Jenkins

Jenkins is an open source, extensible continuous integration server that has the ability to build and test software projects or monitor the execution of external jobs. Jenkins is easy to install and configure, and is thus widely used. That makes it ideal as an example to learn continuous integration.

Installing and configuring Jenkins

We mentioned easy installation as one of the advantages of Jenkins and installation could not be any easier. Download the native package for the operating system of your choice from http://jenkins-ci.org/. There are native packages for all major server and desktop operating systems. In the following examples, we will be using version 1.592. We will run the .war file after downloading it, since it does not require administrative privileges to do so.

Once finished, copy the war into a selected directory, ~/jenkins, and then run the following command:

$ java -jar ~/jenkins/jenkins-1.592.war

This expands and starts Jenkins.

The...