In this post we will see how to install and configure Jenkins CI on FreeBSD.

So, what is Jenkins?

Here’s just a short description of what Jenkins CI is and for what purposes you might want to consider using it.

Jenkins provides a Continuous Integration System, which makes the whole process of integrating changes to a project much easier for developers.

Thinking of a software project where each developer submits changes, the more the developers the higher the chance is of someone breaking the build at some point.

Jenkins can help you overcome this problem with building and testing software projects continuously, and help you discover failures quickly as they happen.

Besides just building and testing a project you can use Jenkins in virtually anything you can think of.

Here are just a few examples of what you can use Jenkins for:

• Building and testing of a software project
• Monitoring executions of externally-run jobs
• Package building server - continuous building of packages for your GNU/Linux or BSD systems
• Deployment tool - deploy quckly changes as soon as they are verified and confirmed to your systems
• etc

In this handbook we will start off with the installation and configuration of Jenkins and later we will see how to create a few example projects.

For more information on Jenkins CI and Continuous Integration, please check the links below:

• Official site of Jenkins
• Continuous Integration

Requirements

• root access or sudo rights

Tested And Verified

The setup explained in this handbook has been tested and verified on:

• FreeBSD 9.0 system
• jenkins-1.472

Installation of Jenkins

To install Jenkins using the FreeBSD Ports Collection execute the command below:

$ sudo make -C /usr/ports/devel/jenkins make install clean

To install Jenkins using the FreeBSD’s pkgng execute the command below:

$ sudo pkg install -y jenkins

Once you’ve got Jenkins installed, we can continue to the next step and configure it.

Enable Jenkins during boot-time

First let’s enable Jenkins, so that it starts during boot-time.

To do that add the following line to your /etc/rc.conf file:

jenkins_enable="YES"

Starting Jenkins

Now let’s start Jenkins CI for the first time:

$ sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/jenkins start

Configuration of Jenkins

Once Jenkins is fully operational it will start listening on port 8180.

To check your new Jenkins CI instance open up a browser to your system on port 8180, e.g. http://localhost:8180/jenkins/.

Jenkins is fully configurable from its web interface. From now on everything we need to configure on Jenkins is going to be done using the web interface.

In order to configure your Jenkins CI instance you need to go to Manage Jenkins -> Configure System.

Every configuration setting has a question mark next to it’s right explaining what a setting does, so whenever in doubt check the help messages.

Here we are going to do just a basic configuration of Jenkins, for a more detailed configuration examples please refer to the official web site of Jenkins and the Jenkins Wiki page for advanced configuration settings.

On the above screenshot you can see that we’ve configured the System Message and number of executors Jenkins will use during builds.

Now let’s secure a bit our Jenkins instance:

As you can see from the above screenshot we’ve configured one user with full administrator access to the Jenkins instance and we’ve configured access for the anonymous users.

For more information on securing your Jenkins CI instance, please refer to the Securing Jenkins documentation.

And the last thing we are going to configure is the E-mail Notifications, so that we get notification status about the builds.

As mentioned earlier this is just a basic configuration of our Jenkins CI instance and you are also advised to play a bit with the configuration options and check the online documentation as well for more information about Jenkins.

Setting up a Jenkins job for building a software project

Lets create now a Jenkins project that will build and test a real-world project. For the purposes of this example we will be building and testing the FreeBSD’s pkgng project.

First lets start with installing a few plugins for Jenkins.

We will need the following plugins installed before being able to build our example project.

• Git Plugin
• Github Plugin
• Clone Workspace SCM Plugin

In order to install the needed plugins navigate through your Jenkins CI instance to Manage Jenkins -> Manage Plugins -> Available and select the above plugins, then click on the Install button.

Once the above plugins have been installed we need to configure the Git plugin, so navigate to Manage Jenkins -> Configure System and scroll down to the Git section

If you see the There's no such executable git in PATH: /sbin, /bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/bin. like on the screenshot below you will need to update your path to the Git executable:

As with FreeBSD any software installed that is not part of the base system gets installed in /usr/local, so you need to update the path to the Git executable to /usr/local/bin/git.

Now that we have the plugins installed and configured, lets create our first Jenkins job. To do that navigate to New Job, give the job a name and select the Build a free-style software project, then press the OK button.

Setting up an upstream project in Jenkins

A few things to note here is that our Jenkins job will be configured in the following way:

1. One upstream project that will poll the remote Git repository every 30 minutes
2. If there are new changes made in the remote Git repository we pull those changes
3. Archive the Git repository so that downstream projects can clone it and then build it
4. Trigger a build on the downstream projects
5. Downstream projects will be building the project using GCC and LLVM Clang

In other words our upstream project is the one that triggers a build on the downstream projects whenever a new change to Git repository is made.

Once you create a new job in Jenkins you need to configure it.

On the above screenshot we have configured the following things:

• Description of the job
• We want to keep max of 100 builds for the project
• The project link at Github

The next thing we need to configure is Source Code Management. This is where we define the remote Git repository, the branches we want to build and the repository browser.

Now, lets continue to the Build Triggers. The Build Triggers tell Jenkins when and how a build is being scheduled.

In the screenshot above we tell Jenkins to poll the remote Git repository every 30 minutes for new changes.

One last thing that we are going to do is to prepare the repository for cloning on the downstream projects as well.

This saves the time needed for doing a clone of the Git repository and also makes sure that all builds we make are done from a clean state, meaning a full rebuild of project itself.

To do that we need to select Archive for Clone Workspace SCM in the Post-build Actions section as shown in the screenshot below:

And that was it with the configuration of our upstream project in Jenkins. Now we can configure our downstream projects which will take care of building pkgng with GCC and LLVM Clang.

Setting up downstream projects in Jenkins for FreeBSD’s pkgng

Just like in the previous step where we’ve configured the upstream pkgng project in Jenkins we will now configure a downstream project for pkgng* for building the project using GCC and LLVM Clang.

Navigate to New Job -> Build a free-style software project and use a project name pkgng-gcc.

Now we will add the downstream project description, max number of builds and Github project just like we did in the previous step.

Next we do the configuration in the Source Code Management section. Here we are going to use the workspace of the upstream pkgng project which we’ve already archived and now we can use for building.

In Source Code Management select Clone Workspace and choose pkgng as the Parent Project as shown in the screenshot below:

In the Build Triggers section we will configure that our project gets build after the upstream pkgng project is built.

This creates the relation between the upstream and downstream projects in Jenkins.

Now it is time to define the commands used to perform the actual build of the project and that is defined in the Build section.

To do that in the Build section we select Execute shell option define the commands used to build the project as shown in the screenshot below.

To build the project we just add one line:

env CC=gcc make

Now whenever a new change being pushed to the remote Git repository of pkgng this will trigger a new build of the project using GCC on the downstream project.

In order to create another downstream project using LLVM Clang you can follow the steps of this section, and the only change you need to do is to replace the command for building the project with the one below:

env CC=clang make

In order to test that everything works as expected just go ahead and trigger a build on the upstream pkgng project and monitor the result in it’s downstream projects for GCC and LLVM Clang.

Further reading

As mentioned in the beginning in this post this is just a quick and dirty introduction to Continuous Integration with Jenkins under FreeBSD.

You are also advised to check the online documentation about Jenkins and Continuous Integration on the topic.

Jenkins also provides lots of ready-to-use plugins which extend further it’s functionality. You can check the available plugins for Jenkins here and install them as needed.