Jenkins

Jenkins is an open source continuous integration tool written in Java. The project was forked from Hudson after a dispute with Oracle, which claims the right to trademark the Hudson name and has applied for such a trademark as of December 2010.^[2]
Jenkins provides continuous integration services for software development. It is a server-based system running in a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat. It supports SCM tools including CVS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Perforce, Clearcase and RTC, and can execute Apache Ant and Apache Maven based projects as well as arbitrary shell scripts and Windows batch commands. The primary developer of Jenkins is Kohsuke Kawaguchi.^[3] Released under the MIT License, Jenkins is free software.^[4]
Builds can be started by various means, including being triggered by commit in a version control system, scheduling via a cron-like mechanism, building when other builds have completed, and by requesting a specific build URL.

Contents

• 1 History
• 2 Hudson
• 3 Plugins
• 4 Example
• 5 See also
• 6 References
• 7 External links

History

Its creation started in summer of 2004 in Sun Microsystems. It was first released in java.net in Feb. 2005.^[5]
Around 2007 Jenkins became known as the better alternative to CruiseControl and other open-source build-servers.^[3][6] At the JavaOne conference in May 2008 the software won the Duke's Choice Award in the Developer Solutions category.^[7] In 2011, creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi received a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for his work on the Jenkins project.

Hudson

Jenkins was originally developed as the Hudson project. During November 2010, an issue arose in the Hudson community with respect to the infrastructure used, which grew to encompass questions over the stewardship and control by Oracle.^[8] Negotiations between the principal project contributors and Oracle took place, and although there were many areas of agreement a key sticking point was the trademarked name "Hudson".^[9] As a result, on January 11, 2011, a call for votes was made to change the project name from "Hudson" to "Jenkins".^[10] The proposal was overwhelmingly approved by community vote on January 29, 2011 creating the Jenkins project.^[11][12] On February 1, 2011, Oracle said that they intended to continue development of Hudson, and considered Jenkins a fork rather than a rename.^[13] Jenkins and Hudson therefore continue as two independent projects, each claiming the other is the fork. As of 22 January 2013, The Jenkins organisation on GitHub had 431 project members and 890 public repositories,^[14] Hudson 33 project members and 82 public repositories.^[15] The one month bug statistics are similarly proportioned: for Jenkins 250 bugs were opened and 170 closed, for Hudson 0 bugs were opened and 6 closed the last thirty days. Hudson development has recently moved to Eclipse so these metrics may not accurately represent project activity.

Plugins

Plugins have been released for Jenkins that extend its use to projects written in languages other than Java.^[16] Plugins are available for integrating Jenkins with most version control systems and big databases. Many build tools are supported via their respective plugins. Plugins can also change the way Jenkins looks or add new functionality.
Builds can generate test reports in various formats (JUnit is supported out-of-the-box, others via plugins) and Jenkins can display the reports and generate trends and render them in the GUI.

Example

Every server running an instance of Jenkins offers an overview of the build status for all projects that were configured to be built on the server. This overview page is implemented with the help of an Apache HTTP server. For most users and administrators this is the most important way of getting up-to-date information about current builds and configuration of their Jenkins instance. An openly available example is the OsmoCom project.^[17] Osmocom is a project that consists of several sub-projects so that many builds are necessary to get an overview of the complete project. Even a project manager (usually not interested in details of build management) can get an overview of his project's status at any time. A well-configured Jenkins server allows access to this page only after proper login, depending on access permissions administered by an LDAP server. While the configuration manager is allowed to trigger builds through this web page, the project manager will only get status information. This is in contrast to software developers who usually have access permission for more detailed build results like automated error analysis through static code analysis.