Use Cases of Jenkins :

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins is an open source automation server. It helps automate the parts of software development related to building, testing, and deploying, facilitating continuous integration and continuous delivery. It is a server-based system that runs in servlet containers such as Apache Tomcat.

Features of Jenkins

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery :

As an extensible automation server, Jenkins can be used as a simple CI server or turned into the continuous delivery hub for any project.

Easy installation :

Jenkins is a self-contained Java-based program, ready to run out-of-the-box, with packages for Windows, Linux, macOS and other Unix-like operating systems.

Easy configuration :

Jenkins can be easily set up and configured via its web interface, which includes on-the-fly error checks and built-in help.

Plugins :

With hundreds of plugins in the Update Center, Jenkins integrates with practically every tool in the continuous integration and continuous delivery toolchain.

Extensible :

Jenkins can be extended via its plugin architecture, providing nearly infinite possibilities for what Jenkins can do.

Distributed :

Jenkins can easily distribute work across multiple machines, helping drive builds, tests and deployments across multiple platforms faster.

Jenkins Use Cases in various other technologies

Android :

As one of the predominant mobile platforms, Android is attractive to a number of developers, but it does bring it’s own set of challenges with it. With an extremely broad set of devices available on the market, building and testing for the matrix of device configurations can be very challenging. With the Android emulator plugin however, it is possible to build and test on a myriad of emulated devices.

When combined with the Google Play Publisher plugin, Android developers can build true continuous delivery pipeline, sending builds to an alpha channel in Google Play for release or further testing.

GitHub :

With the help of the Git plugin Jenkins can easily pull source code from any Git repository that the Jenkins build node can access.

The GitHub plugin extends upon that integration further by providing improved bi-directional integration with GitHub. Allowing you to set up a Service Hook which will hit your Jenkins instance every time a change is pushed to GitHub.

Java :

Jenkins supports building Java projects since its inception. If you want to build a Java project, there are a bunch of different options. The most typical ones nowadays are generally Apache Maven, or Gradle.

Python :

Unlike compiled languages, Python doesn’t need a “build” per se. Python projects can still benefit greatly from using Jenkins for continuous integration and delivery.

In the Python ecosystem there are tools which can be integrated into Jenkins for testing/reporting such as nose2 and pytest for executing unit tests, pylint for generating code quality reports.

PHP :

Most web applications are changed and adapted quite frequently and quickly. Their environment, for example the size and the behaviour of the user base, are constantly changing. What was sufficient yesterday can be insufficient today. Especially in a web environment it is important to monitor and continuously improve the internal quality not only when developing, but also when maintaining the software.

Many of the plugins referenced (right) can be used to integrate with PHP projects, but may first need to be configured the create appropriately formatted files when working with PHP projects.

There are many more use cases solved by Jenkins…

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