Jenkins – Continuous Integration (Development, Build, Test & Release)

Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous Integration is a software development practice where team members integrate their work frequently, usually each individual integrates at least daily that leads to multiple integration everyday. Each integration is verified by an automated build that includes unit testing to find integration errors as fast as possible. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software more rapidly.

This article is about quick practical of Continuous Integration summarizing the technique and its current usage.

Continuous Integration is backed by several important principles and practices.

Maintain a single source repository
Automate the build
Make your build self-testing
Every commit should build on an integration machine
Keep the build fast
Test in a clone of the production environment
Make it easy for anyone to get the latest executable
Everyone can see what’s happening
Automate deployment

Continuous Deployment (CD)

Continuous deployment is very closely related to continuous integration and refers to the release into staging of software that passes the automated tests.

By adopting both Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, one not only reduce risks and catch bugs quickly, but also move rapidly to working software.With low-risk releases, you can quickly adapt to business requirements and user needs. This allows for greater collaboration between ops and delivery, fueling real change in your organisation, and turning your release process into a business advantage.

To create practical scenario of continuous integration we are going four instance or virtual machines as follows, diagram quick understanding

Dev machine from where code changes are pushed
Git (repository) machine for code management
Jenkin machine, continuous integration (CI) server
QA/UAT machine
- must have win server machine (2008 or 2012)
- running Web Deployment Agent Service (ref Windows Deployment Services)
- running Web Management Service (ref Windows Deployment Services)

In nutshell, only four important commands require to complete entire process

Git
- Management tool where code resides
MSbuild (Microsoft Build Engine)
- build and create release package (.zip))
Vstest.console
- run unit testing of release assembly
MSdeploy (Microsoft Deploy Engine)
- deploy package and sql on QA machine

Jenkins configuration is so vital for successful completion of CI & CD automation, nothin to worry, it is not so complax if one knows process flow and associated commands, so let us go through it step by step

Repository setup to pull code
- We are going to use git as code repository to pull code changes
- ref Git Setting
Set Build Trigger
- We could choose periodically execute automatically
- ref Poll SCM
Microsoft Build
- MSBuild to clean and build solution here compilation errors are catched
- ref Build Setting
Unit Test
- VSTest for unit testing
- ref Unit Testing
- It creates TestResults after unit testing
- remove test result (ref: Remove Unit Testing Result)
Set solution to publish and release package in zip format
- ref video Jenkins – ASP.NET MVC Build, Test & Manual Deploy
Set MSBuild to create deployable package
- ref Deploy Package
Set Artifacts
- ref Artifacts
How to do manual deployment
- QA import release or deploy-able package
- ref video Jenkins – ASP.NET MVC Build, Test & Manual Deploy
How to do auto deployment
- MSDeploy command setup in Jenkins
- Create Empty Site in IIS
- ref video Jenkins – ASP.NET MVC Build, Test & Auto Deploy