Chapter 1. Setup and Configuration of Jenkins

Welcome to Mastering Jenkins. In this book, we will journey into the world of build pipelines, automated testing, product delivery, and automation. Together we will discover innovative ways to integrate Jenkins into the last mile of software development, while furthering our knowledge of modern software engineering and delivery practices. We will also discover scalable solutions that will help us catch defects faster and deliver reliable software releases at higher velocities.

Our quest to master Jenkins will take us on an adventure in software engineering, quality assurance, operations, architecture, and business process. These diverse engineering and business disciplines uniquely tie together in software delivery pipelines. By thought leading an organization and evangelizing good software development practices, we can implement diversely scalable pipelines across any number of technology stacks. As a result, an organization can outpace and outmaneuver its competition.

Sprinkled throughout the pages of this book, you will discover some Zen proverbs, which will be used to enlighten our journey. In literary works and historical texts, Zen proverbs can be found in books that date back as early as the Tang dynasty [618–907 AD]. During this period, Zen proverbs and Koans were widely adopted by Buddhist monks as a way of promoting enlightenment through critical thinking and self-discovery. These were further used as a way of teaching patience, persistence, and enlightenment.

	"If you are planning for a year, sow rice. If you are planning for a decade, plant a tree. If you are planning for a lifetime, educate people."
	--A Chinese Proverb

This proverb instills values of planning, forethought, and education. These values are key components to engineering, and encourage a plan for future sustainability. In Jenkins, we can apply this concept to the architecture of software delivery pipelines. When advocating for any cross-discipline collaborative cross-discipline practices we will need to evangelize good architecture, plan the implementation properly, define conventions, build a scalable solution, and then educate the user base. By doing this, we can prevent most long-term Jenkins management nightmares by making it easier to navigate and maintain. Due to the highly configurable nature of Jenkins, and the various moving parts of the SDLC structuring the system carefully and organizing it should be a constant consideration.

In this chapter, we will begin our journey by discovering proven Jenkins management techniques that can help us provide a stable and scalable Jenkins experience. Together we will learn to adjust Jenkins to fit unique organizational requirements and provide better performance and fewer maintenance headaches. Let's begin!

In this chapter, our focus will be on the following topics:

• The Jenkins platform architecture

• Jenkins on Microsoft Windows

• Configuring the JVM and Java arguments

• Jenkins on Linux and Unix

• Running Jenkins behind an NGINX reverse proxy

• Running Jenkins behind an Apache reverse proxy

• Creating and managing Jenkins backups

• Setting up a Jenkins mirror

• Jenkins on Mac OSX

• The Jenkins LTS release line

• Jenkins XML configuration files