Jenkins Playground

Jenkins is an open-source automation tool that companies can use to build and automate their CI/CD pipelines. CI stands for Continuous Integration and CD stands for Continuous Deployment or Delivery. It automates the various stages of the software development life cycle like building, testing, packaging, deploying built applications on infrastructure, etc.

If you’re unfamiliar with Jenkins we’ve got you covered! We have a complete Jenkins course where we teach you absolutely everything you need to know, as a beginner. As you go along and learn more about this tool, you can come back to this playground and experiment with new ideas you might have. We hope you’ll have a super easy and fun learning experience!

Features of Jenkins

• Offers a wide range of plugins to integrate other tools with Jenkins. Some of them include Git, Mailer, Kubernetes, etc.
• Open source with massive community support.
• Compatible with different operating systems like macOS, Linux, Windows, BSD, and others.
• Easy to set up and connect the agent nodes with Jenkins servers.
• Create and set up pipelines using the user interface provided by Jenkins.

Use cases of Jenkins

1. Continuous Integration - Developers can integrate the incremental changes in the code into a central repository. Jenkins allows integration of these changes and runs test cases for the code before building its executable.
2. Continuous Delivery or Deployment - Jenkins automates the deployment of the code in various environments. This allows the newer releases to be pushed automatically to production.
3. Automation - Repetitive tasks can be automated using Jenkins. This dismisses the possibility of human error while performing the same tasks quicker, and on multiple machines. 

How does Jenkins work?

Jenkins is generally used as a Master-Agent architecture. It enables Jenkins to manage multiple builds at a time. Jenkins contains two components in its architecture:

A. Jenkins Master

1. Responsible for the orchestration of all the pipelines.
2. Provides user interface to create and build the pipelines.
3. Stores the configurations required for accessing the repositories, servers, databases, etc.
4. Allows connecting to the different plugins for extensibility.

B. Jenkins Agent

1. Responsible for the execution of the pipelines. All the steps mentioned in the pipelines are executed on the servers where the agent is installed.

The Jenkins playground gives you access to the Jenkins server along with Gitea. Gitea is a self-hosted Git service. You can access the user interfaces of Jenkins as well as Gitea. The environment comes preconfigured with a git repository cloned in the server. The Jenkins server consists of a sample job that can be used for running the pipeline and help you get started with the platform.