Building a Build Server – Installing Jenkins

In this series of articles, we are going to install and configure Jenkins. The goal is to configure build options for a .NET library project and publish it as a NuGet package for other projects. The publication can be either into the http://nuget.org public NuGet package repository or to a private one for your company.

In this specific article, we are going to install download Jenkins to a Windows host computer, because building .NET code is the easiest to automate in Windows environment. In later articles, we are going to review how to do the same on a Unix based environment (Linux, OSX, BSD).

The first step in installing Jenkins is to download the installer. To grab the installer, go first to https://jenkins.io/index.html. On the top part of the homepage, select the downloads option.

During the download selection, you have two options to choose from. As mentioned on the page itself as well, the LTS version is released every 12 weeks and is considered a much more stable option than the Weekly release. If your required plugins don’t crash, the better option for production build server is the LTS version. In some cases, where you need instant fix for a problem in a plugin or the base system, you can jump temporarily to the weekly release. On the appropriate versions download button, select the installer format, we are going to need the Windows version, which is a setup.exe. After downloading the setup.exe, don’t forget to run it through a virus scanner.

Starting the Jenkins Installer, click on Next.

While we are really advancing the field of programming, we are still constantly having problem with spaces in the file names. To make our lives easier, change the default home directory of Jenkins to C:\Jenkins. This will also shorten the path for file names during the build, as long file names can cause problem too.

As the installer window also says, click install to begin the installation. As the installation needs to happen as an Administrator, you will need to allow administrative access to the installer.

All you need to do for a while is to wait until the installer installs the software.

  

Acknowledge that the software has been installed and let’s begin with the configuration of the system.

After the installation process is finished, the installer will open a web browser pointing to the web interface of your Jenkins installation. You will need to create the first admin user for the installation, but to avoid people playing funny games over the internet, Jenkins will ask you to provide a secret token that the installer placed on the computer. To provide this token, simply open the file on the red line with notepad and copy past the whole text from it into the textbox, then click Continue. Your file name may be different, depending on what installation directory you have provided during the installation.

If you know in advance, which plugins you want to use, you can tailor them here. Installing a plugin does not take too much place on the hard drive, and can changed later, so usually the easiest way is to go with installing the suggested plugins. Click on it.

And again, wait until the plugins are installed.

  

  

After the plugins are installed, provide the user name, the full name and password, as well as, the email address of your first user and click on the Save and Finish button.

Acknowledge that the installation process is complete by clicking on the Start using Jenkins button and you will be presented with the Jenkins web user interface.

Jenkins is ready for configuring new tasks. Follow me by using the icons in the Follow me box below, and in the next article, we are going to package a C# library from github.com, as a first steps to develop NuGet packages to distribute code.

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