Jenkins is a powerful application that allows continuous integration and continuous delivery of projects, regardless of the platform you are working on. It is a free source that can handle any kind of build or continuous integration. You can integrate Jenkins with several testing and deployment technologies. In this tutorial, we would explain how you can use Jenkins to build and test your software projects continuously.

Audience

This tutorial is going to help all those software testers who would like to learn how to build and test their projects continue to help the developers to integrate the changes to the project as quickly as possible and obtain fresh builds.

Prerequisites

Jenkins is a popular tool for performing continuous integration of software projects. This is a preliminary tutorial that covers the most fundamental concepts of Jenkins. Any software professional having a good understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle should benefit from this tutorial.

Jenkins – Overview

Why Jenkins?

Jenkins is a software that allows continuous integration. Jenkins will be installed on a server where the central build will take place. The following flowchart demonstrates a very simple workflow of how Jenkins works.

Along with Jenkins, sometimes, one might also see the association of Hudson. Hudson is a very popular open-source Java-based continuous integration tool developed by Sun Microsystems which was later acquired by Oracle. After the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, a fork was created from the Hudson source code, which brought about the introduction of Jenkins.

What is Continuous Integration?

Continuous Integration is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository at regular intervals. This concept was meant to remove the problem of finding the later occurrences of issues in the build lifecycle. Continuous integration requires the developers to have frequent builds. The common practice is that whenever a code commit occurs, a build should be triggered.

System Requirements

JDK	JDK 1.5 or above
Memory	2 GB RAM (recommended)
Disk Space	No minimum requirement. Note that since all builds will be stored on the Jenkins machines, it has to be ensured that sufficient disk space is available for build storage.
Operating System Version	Jenkins can be installed on Windows, Ubuntu/Debian, Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS, Mac OS X, OpenSUSE, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Gentoo.
Java Container	The WAR file can be run in any container that supports Servlet 2.4/JSP 2.0 or later. (An example is Tomcat 5).