Jenkins (also known as Jenkins CI) is the world’s most powerful open source continuous integration server designed from the offset to provide over 300 plugins for building and testing any software project. It is a web-based application that runs on top of a web server, such as Apache.
Features at a glance
With Jenkins, you can monitor the execution of repeated jobs, including those run by cron or a similar automation software. It is easily installable, configurable and supports third-party plugins, distributed builds, as well as file fingerprinting.
In addition, Jenkins’ highlights include after-the-fact tagging, JUnit and TestNG test reporting, support for permanent links, support for mainstream operating systems and architectures, change set support, RSS, Instant Messaging and email integration.
Getting started with Jenkins
Jenkins is an easy-to-use and easy-to-install software project, but it has a great number of advanced feartures, for which its developers offer a detailed getting started with Jenkins guide, teaching you how to start, access and administering Jenkins, as well as to do various operations.
For example, you will learn how to build a software project, a Maven project, a matrix project, an Android app, monitor external jobs, use Jenkins plugins, file fingerprint tracking, secure Jenkins, change the timezone, use other shells, split a large job in smaller pieces, use Jenkins for non-Java projects, as well as to access the Jenkins script console, the command-line interface and SSH (Secure Shell).
Additionally, the user will learn how to integrate Jenkins with Drupal, Python, Perl and .NET projects, remove and disable third-party plugins, run Jenkins from behind a HTTP/HTTPS proxy, and many other useful things.
Supported operating systems
Being designed for the Web, Jenkins is a platform-independent application that has been successfully tested on several GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE and Gentoo, various BSD flavors, including FreeBSD and OpenBSD, Solaris (OpenIndiana), Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.
