Using Jenkins

One of the most popular open source continuous integration tools is Jenkins. The good news is that Jenkins has support for Gradle via the Gradle plugin. Let's see how we can use the plugin to add our little Java project to Jenkins.

To install Jenkins on our computer, we must first download the installation files from the Jenkins website. A native installer is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. We simply run the installer software to install Jenkins on our computer. We can also download a WAR file and deploy it to a Java web container to install Jenkins. The WAR file is also a Java executable archive. This means that we can simply run the WAR file with the java -jar command to execute Jenkins.

Adding the Gradle plugin

First, we must install the Gradle plugin in Jenkins. We launch a web browser and access the URL http://localhost:8080. From the Jenkins main page, we select the link Manage Jenkins, which takes us to the appropriate page:

Here, we select Manage plugins. On...