Jenkins Pipeline Fundamentals

Course Objectives

After completing this training module, you should understand the following:

•  How to create, run, analyze and save a Declarative Pipeline using the Blue Ocean Editor and the Blue Ocean text editor
• The structure of a Declarative Pipeline, including the role of the stage, step, agent and post sections
• How to control the flow of execution in a Declarative Pipeline
• How to preserve and use files created by the build and test activities
• Pipeline capabilities that provide fit and finish to your Pipeline

Audience

The course is applicable to:

• Beginner and intermediate Developers
• QA Engineers
• Build and Release Engineers
• Technical Project Managers
• Architects

Prerequisites

• “Jenkins – Fundamentals” course or CJE/CCJE certification
• Students should also have some familiarity with ancillary technologies that are used in this course: Docker, Git, Apache Maven, Gradle, Ant or NPM, Apache Groovy
• The class has been structured so you can do the exercises even if you are not familiar with these tools but learning them will help you implement your Pipelines when you go back to work.

Approach

This course teaches you how to create and run a Jenkins Declarative Pipeline using the Blue Ocean Editor.

• Students create a real-life Pipeline to build, test and deploy a Pipeline.
• The class ends with a quick tour of Pipeline capabilities that provide fit and finish to your Pipeline.

The course uses two projects:

• Demo/follow-along project: Instructor shows how to do things, students can follow along, using copy-paste to populate their version of the project to get a feel for the tools.
• Lab project: Students are given a list of tasks and are expected to figure out how to implement a Pipeline that implements those tasks.

Duration

This training will be delivered for one full day.

Course Modules

Description of Jenkins Pipeline – Fundamentals course

This is a one-day class about creating Jenkins Declarative Pipelines with the Blue Ocean Editor and the Blue Ocean Text Editor.

The course uses two projects:

• Demo/follow-along project: Instructor shows how to do things, students can follow along, using copy-paste to populate their version of the project to get a feel for the tools.
• Lab project: Students are given a list of tasks and are expected to figure out how to implement a Pipeline that implements those tasks.

Section 01 – Pipeline Introduction

Learn about the need for Jenkins Pipeline, key pipeline use cases, structure and syntax and execution control.

Section 02 – Skeletal Pipeline

Open the Blue Ocean Editor, register with the Source Code Management (SCM) system, define stages and steps for the Pipeline, save and run the pipeline and understand the Blue Ocean visualization, and use the Blue Ocean text editor to view the Jenkinsfile for this pipeline

Section 03 – Simple Pipeline

Create a simple Pipeline that implements a deployment lifecycle. This includes saving to an SCM branch, add stages that run tests, understand and archive artifacts, publish JUnit test reports, define and use environment variables and run steps in parallel.

Section 04 – Intermediate Pipeline

Add additional features to the Pipeline and learn to work with the Classic Web UI, including the Stage View visualization. Understand agents, how to use stash/unstash to transfer data from one stage to another, wait for interactive input and add a “Deployment” stage.

Section 05 – Pipeline Fit and Finish

Learn to use the snippet generator to create Pipeline code that the Blue Ocean editor does not yet support and learn about additional features that give you more control and functionality in your Pipeline. This includes creating a post section to define steps to execute at the end of a Pipeline run, working with defined environment variables, how to set up notifications, using credentials to access secured external resources such as Nexus and Elasticsearch without requiring that all users know the password, and using options directives to control the characteristics and behavior of the Pipeline. This section ends with an introduction to build tools (such as Apache Maven, Gradle, NPM, Apache Ant and Make) and their role in creating a Pipeline for Continuous Delivery

Section 06 – Advanced Features

Introduces additional topics of interest to people creating Pipelines including shared library functions that can be created once and

propagated to many Pipelines to perform common tasks, templates that standardize Pipelines in an organization, and the triggers directive used to schedule specialized runs of a Pipeline.