Paul Grenyer

Developing software is hard and all good developers are lazy. This is one of the reasons we have tools which automate practices like continuous integration, static analysis and measuring test coverage. The practices help us to measure quality and find problems with code early. When you measure something you can make it better. Automation makes it easy to perform the practices and means that lazy developers are likely to perform them more often, especially if they’re automatically performed every time the developer checks code in. This is old news. These practices have been around for more than twenty years. They have become industry standards and not using them is, quite rightly, frowned upon. What is relatively new is the introduction of cloud based services such as BitBucket Pipelines , CircleCI and SonarCloud which allow you to set up these practices in minutes, however with this flexibility and efficiency comes a cost. Why While BitBucket Pipelines, CircleCI and SonarCloud have fre...

Run Jenkins in Docker with Docker Compose Why use Jenkins I hear you ask? Well, for me the answers are simple: familiarity and the availability of an existing tested and officially supported Docker image. I have been using Jenkins for as long as I can remember.  The official image is here: https://hub.docker.com/r/jenkins/jenkins After getting Jenkins up and running in the container we’ll look at creating a ‘Pipeline’ with the Docker Pipeline plugin. Jenkins supports lots of different ‘Items’, which used to be called ‘Jobs’, but Docker can be used to encapsulate build and test environments as well. In fact this is what BitBucket Pipelines and CircleCI also do. To run Jenkins Pipeline we need a Jenkins installation with Docker installed. The easiest way to do this is to use the existing Jenkins Docker image from Docker Hub. Open a new command prompt and create a new directory for the development pipeline configuration and a sub directory called Jenkins with the following Dockerfi...