With this guideline, you can deploy and run Jenkins on your local machine as well as on Azure Container Instances.
Jenkins is one of the most popular open-source DevOps tools and it has been widely adopted by many development projects as a leading CI engine.
Jenkins Documentation can be found on the Jenkins User Documentation page.
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Jenkins is a cross-platform Continuous Integration tool that builds and test software projects continuously.
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Jenkins is developed in Java programming languages that provide real-time testing and reporting.
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Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project.
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Jenkins has both a GUI interface and console commands.
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Jenkins is an open-source CI tool completely compiled and written in Java that originated as a subsidiary of Oracle created by Sun Microsystems.
- Make sure that system has Java JDK on it
sudo apt update
sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk- Add Jenkins Repository
wget -q -O - https://pkg.jenkins.io/debian/jenkins.io.key | sudo apt-key add –
sudo sh -c 'echo deb http://pkg.jenkins.io/debian-stable binary/ > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jenkins.list'
sudo apt update- Install Jenkins
sudo apt install jenkinsJenkins will run on http://localhost:8080
After a few seconds, Jenkins will be redirected to Getting Started page and wait for the user to enter the initial administrator password.
After unlocking Jenkins, it requires selecting a plugin set to install. Jenkins can be installed with a pre-defined set of plugins, or, you can select which plugins you want to install with Jenkins.
Installation usually takes a couple of minutes.
After installation is done, Jenkins will redirect to Main Page
Boom! 💣 It's done!
You can use Jenkins, now 🎉
Installing Jenkins requires so many manual steps, it's not so easy to automate to ready a Jenkins machine.
Also, you need to prepare a machine to install Jenkins. It's your responsibility to make this machine up and running all the time.
So, you need to take care of backup and restore plans, you need to plan for disaster scenarios, etc.
The following guideline will help you to;
- Build a custom Docker Image for Jenkins which has plugins you want to use
It the end, you'll have a Jenkins instance running on you local machine.
Let's start;
- Create a Dockerfile with the following content
FROM jenkins/jenkins:2.230
ARG JENKINS_USERNAME=demouser
ARG JENKINS_PASSWORD=demo@pass123
ENV JENKINS_USERNAME $JENKINS_USERNAME
ENV JENKINS_PASSWORD $JENKINS_PASSWORD
ENV JAVA_OPTS -Djenkins.install.runSetupWizard=false
RUN echo "Starting installation of Jenkins Plugins" \
&& /usr/local/bin/install-plugins.sh \
"git" \
"azure-commons" \
"azure-acs" \
"azure-app-service" \
"azure-cli" \
&& echo "Done"
COPY ./default-user.groovy /usr/share/jenkins/ref/init.groovy.d/As you can see, we're using the latest version of Jenkins (at the time of this writing) which is version 2.230
We have 2 ARG commands to accept some variables during docker build
Also, we have 2 ENV commands to use the ARG variables to create environment variables. Those environment variables will set the administrator user name and password for Jenkins.
There is a list of plugins that will be installed with the Jenkins. You can add or remove plugins by modifying the plugins list.
You can find a list of all plugins on Jenkins Plugin Index
Get the ID of a plugin (for example, azure-acs for Azure Container Service) and add it the list of plugins in the Dockerfile
The problem is, we still have to create a Jenkins user and set it as the default Jenkins user.
Jenkins, during installation, can (and will) load Groovy files if they're in the /usr/share/jenkins/ref/ folder.
Last line of the Dockerfile copies default-user.groovy file into the correct folder in the Docker Image.
So, Jenkins will not need the user to create Jenkins User during installation.
At this point, we step closer to the fully automated Jenkins installation.
Let's build the Docker Image first;
docker build -t jenkins:v1 .
After the successful build of the Jenkins Docker Image, we can run it on our machines to test it properly;
docker run -d -it -p 8080:8080 jenkins:v1
Let's test it on the browser, open https://localhost:8080 on your favorite browser (mine is, Chromium-based Edge)
You should see Jenkins Main Page, but this time from Docker Container.
Now we have a running Jenkins installation on our machines, thanks to custom Jenkins image and Docker. But it's not highly available, it's not available at all, for most of the cases.
Having a virtual machine somewhere (probably on cloud) solve availability but not high-availability problems, we need to have at least 2 identical virtual machines which has Jenkins on them.
Also, we need to utilize Monitoring solution and Load Balancer type mechanism to make Jenkins installation highly available.
Azure Container Instances may solve availability and high availability problems at once.
After creating a custom Jenkins Docker image on your machine (you can follow guideline on Guideline to build custom Jenkins image and run it on your machine) it's time to push Docker image to Azure Container Registry and run it on Azure Container Instances.
So, steps are;
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Push custom Jenkins Docker Image to Azure Container Registry
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Create an Azure Container Instance based on the custom Jenkins Docker Image from the Azure Container Registry
It the end, you'll have a Jenkins instance running on Azure Container Instances.
- Create the Azure Resource Group first;
az group create --location westeurope --name amsterdamrg- We can create Azure Container Registry in the Resource Group now;
az acr create --resource-group amsterdamrg --name amsterdamacr --sku basic --admin-enabled true- We need to get credentials to push a Docker image to Azure Container Registry
USERNAME=`az acr credential show --resource-group amsterdamrg --name amsterdamacr --query username -o tsv`
PASSWORD=`az acr credential show --resource-group amsterdamrg --name amsterdamacr --query passwords[0].value -o tsv`- [Optional] We can use already built image from Guideline to build custom Jenkins image and run it on your machine or we can build Jenkins image here, with Azure Container Registry Build Docker Image service;
az acr build --image jenkins:latest --registry amsterdamacr --file ./Dockerfile .- Last (but not least) we need to create an Azure Container Instance from Jenkins image in the Azure Container Registry
FQDN=`az container create \
--name "amsterdamjenkins" \
--resource-group amsterdamrg \
--image "amsterdamacr.azurecr.io/jenkins:latest" \
--registry-login-server "$USERNAME.azurecr.io" \
--registry-username $USERNAME \
--registry-password $PASSWORD \
--dns-name-label "amsterdamjenkins" \
--port 8080 \
--query ipAddress.fqdn \
--output tsv`- Now we can print url of the newly created Jenkins instance on Azure Container Instances to Terminal
echo "You can click http://$FQDN:8080 to launch Jenkins interface on your browser"