Some thoughts, ideas and fun!!!

Overview

So, my team was recently assigned to help another team with their product.  This product is built on the Microsoft world of C# and Silverlight.  With C# being my home language and the platform of choice for a lot of people out there because it is so extremely powerful I wanted to see how hard it would be to use some of the tools we’ve been using on the other projects.  This meant installing and running Jenkins on windows to do a pull of the source code hosted in Team Foundation Server and running a build on the solution as well as some unit tests.  So in light of this background I’ll be explaining how to setup Jenkins.  I’ll be going into installing Jenkins as a Master Build Server as well as how to set it up to run as a Slave to my Ubuntu Jenkins Build Server.  Seeing that I’ve been working on more open source type of stuff and enjoying it so much I decided that I would like to use the toolsets that we’ve been using on those projects to help us maintain the same visibility on the Microsoft side of the world.  So, what I’ll be going through are as follows:

1. Pre-requisites
2. Downloading Jenkins
3. Installing Jenkins as a Windows Service
4. Configuring Jenkins as a Master Build Server
5. Configuring Jenkins as a Slave
6. Creating a Job on the Slave
7. Conclusion

If you want to see how I installed the Master Build Server on my Ubuntu environment you can have a look at my article called “Setup – Apache and Jenkins”.  In this article I’ll be creating a Jenkins Slave to that Jenkins environment.

Pre-requisites

To run Jenkins on a Windows machine you’ll need to install the Java stuff.  To do this you can follow the instructions as described on the Java site.

Downloading Jenkins

To download Jenkins you should go to their home page and grab their “Latest and greatest” war file.

Installing Jenkins as a Windows Service

In this section I’ll be explain how you could install Jenkins as a Windows Service.  Of course you would be able to run Jenkins from the Command Line by opening a Command Prompt and browsing to the folder where you have your Jenkins.war file downloaded.  I don’t like this because it’s dirty and because I’ll probably want to install it on a Build Server somewhere and for that reason you won’t have someone logged in all the time.  To run it from the Command Line you can run the following command:

java -jar jenkins.war

This will extract the Jenkins files to a folder “.jenkins” under your User Account’s folder.  Usually something like “C:\Users\[UserName]\.jenkins”.  I don’t like this either so I would suggest setting up an Environment Variable called “JENKINS_HOME” to show to the place where you want Jenkins to run.  In my case I want it to run under “E:\Software\Jenkins\.jenkins” so my Environment Variable will point to this folder and when I run the above command again Jenkins will look for this Environment Variable and automatically know to run there.

As mentioned above I don’t like running Jenkins from the Command Line and would prefer to have it run as a Windows Service that starts automatically when I start my Windows environment.  To do this is quite simple.  You should run the command above and then open up a browser and browse to your new running Jenkins’s home page at “http://localhost:8080”.  Once there you should see a link for “Manage Jenkins” that looks like:

When you’ve selected this link it should come up with a page as follows:

In this list you should see a link called “Install as Windows Service”.  When you click this link you should go to a page that looks like:

If you’re happy with the installation folder you should select “Install”, which should then take you to a page as follows:

This means that Jenkins is now installed as a Windows Service and you should see it under the Windows Service Manage as follows:

If you go back to your Jenkins site you should select the “Yes” button which will then stop your Jenkins running the Command Line and start the service for you.  This completes the installation of Jenkins and you should be able to do everything you’ve come to enjoy playing with Jenkins on the Ubuntu installation.

Configuring Jenkins as a Master Build Server

If you’ve followed the steps in the previous section or in my article called ”Setup – Apache and Jenkins” you should have a Master up and running.  I’ll cover how to set up a slave in my next section.

Configuring Jenkins as a Slave

In the case where you want to setup a Jenkins slave running on Windows, you’ll have to go through a few steps.  These are not very hard, but it is quite hard trying to figure out how to do it.  It was for me anyway, which is why I’m creating this article…

To start, open up your Master Jenkins home page in a browser.  Once it’s loaded you should go to the “Manage Jenkins” page by clicking on the “Manage Jenkins” link as follows:

Once you get to the Manage page you should see something like:

In the list you should see the link called “Manage Nodes” as follows:

If you click on it you should be presented by a page that looks like:

You should now select the “New Node” link.  This will take you to a page that looks like:

On this page you should enter name that you want to call you Slave.  In my case I called it “MySlave” and once that’s done you should select the “Dumb Slave” option and click on the OK button which should take you to a page that looks like:

Here you should select the options so your page looks like mine above.  Once done click on the “Save” button, which should take you back to the “Manage Node” page.  On this page you should now see your new Slave listed as below:

When you get to this page you should select your slave, which should take you to a page that looks like:

This is where it starts getting a little bit more interesting…  If you click on the “Launch” button it should ask you to save a file to your local machine.  This file is called “slave-agent.jnlp” and should be saved to the folder where you want to run your Slave.  Once you’ve downloaded this file you should open a Command Prompt and browse to the folder where you downloaded the file to and run the command as follows:

javaws http://10.34.5.43/jenkins/computer/MySlave/slave-agent.jnlp

This should then bring up a window as follows:

On this window you should go to “File->Install as Windows Service”.  This should bring up a message as follows:

In this case you should select the OK button, which will install the slave as a Windows Service.  You should now get a screen as follows:

Click on the OK button so the service can be started.  If you open up the Windows Services Manager you should now see a new Service there as follows:

At this stage you should go back to your Jenkins site and refresh the page, which should then look like:

And that’s it; you’re done and now have a new Slave connected to your Master Build Server.

Creating a Job on the Slave

This works the same as for a normal Build Server with one little annoyance that you should be aware of.  When you go into the “New Job” page you should see a Check Box as follows:

If you want your Job to only run on this Slave then you should enter your slave’s name in this box.

Conclusion

I hope this helps someone out there and makes it a bit easier for you to set up a Jenkins machine or slave on a Windows machine.  Because Jenkins is written in Java you can run it on most environments and because of the way it works you can do Continuous Integration against any code base.