In the fast-paced world of software development, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) have become essential practices for delivering high-quality products efficiently. Jenkins, a leading CI/CD tool, plays a pivotal role in automating various aspects of the development process. This blog will explore Jenkins' functionality and understand how it can streamline your development pipeline.
What Is Jenkins?
Jenkins is an open-source automation server that enables developers to automate the process of building, testing, and deploying applications. Created by Kohsuke Kawaguchi in 2004, Jenkins has grown to become one of the most widely used CI/CD tools globally. Its versatility, ease of use, and extensive plugin ecosystem make it a top choice for organizations looking to enhance their software development lifecycle.
For more details, you can refer to my notes:
What Is CI/CD?
CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. These are crucial practices in modern software development aimed at improving code quality and accelerating delivery.
Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of merging code changes from multiple contributors into a shared repository several times a day. Automated builds and tests are then run to ensure that the new code does not break the existing system.
Continuous Deployment (CD) goes a step further by automatically deploying every change that passes the CI process to production, ensuring that the latest version of the application is always available to users.
What are Plugins?
Advantages of Jenkins
It has lots of plugins available.
You can write your plugins.
You can use community plugins.
Jenkins is not just a tool. It is a framework i.e., You can do whatever you want, all you need is plugins
We can attach slaves (Nodes) to Jenkins master. It instructs other slaves to do jobs. If slaves are not available, Jenkins itself does the job.
Jenkins also behaves as a crone server replacement. i.e., can do scheduled tasks.
It can also create labels.
In this blog, we have gained the basic knowledge and the terminology in Jenkins, now in my next blog we will get to know about Workflow, Installation, and scheduling of projects in Jenkins.