Can someone please let me know what is the relation between Jenkins and Nexus. I'm new to this area so pardon me if this is a stupid question.
Jenkins - a continuous integration (CI) platform.
Nexus - a repository manager.
You also tagged Maven so I guess in short Jenkins triggers Maven, Maven builds your packages, while doing it downloads dependencies from Nexus and also uploads artifacts back to Nexus.
Take Nexus as package repository to distribute your artifacts and Jenkins just as a build machine to build the artifacts.
Related
For my project I need to store jar after each build at some other url. Is there a way to get it done by Jenkins job.
I am quite new to jenkins.
You can find a good explanation on how to publish your artifact to a repository (best practice) here. This is equivalent for Maven3 and Maven2.
The answer refers to Artifactory. Make sure to also take a look at Nexus and Archiva as khmarbaise noted.
tl;dr
If using Artifactory, add the Maven Artifactory Plugin to your pom.
I am in a situation where I have one Build Server box which is to carry out all continuous integration and manage our maven repository. The box works as follows:
There is one maven repository which is hosted through Apache Server as a URL for developers to use
All Jenkins jobs (including release jobs) run mvn install so that artifacts are kept in this one repository.
I would like to get rid of the Apache server and run Nexus on this same box to manage and host repositories, however I have the following questions/ideas:
With Nexus and Jenkins on the same box, will it mean that I will have to manage two repositories, one where maven installs an artifact to a local repository, and one where maven deploys an artifact to nexus? Would it be possible to have Nexus manage the "mvn install" repository also? How can I make sure we don't run out of disk space on the server very very quickly all the time?
Thanks
Added as response to comments: Thank you both, I am thinking I will just set the Jenkins jobs and release plugin goals to mvn package deploy:deploy in order to skip the install phase, that way, artifacts go directly from the target directory to Nexus. However I guess the Jenkins job will require a local repository from which to use depedencies which will get copied from Nexus to the maven local repository during the build, I am not sure if this can be avoided though.
mvn install installs in the local repository
mvn deploy installs to the remote repository
these semantics are defined in the lifecycle and map to different plugins. Their implementations are different.
You don't have to manage the local repository. Actually for some if not most jobs you might even want to define it localized to the job (with the 'Use private Maven repository' option) instead of to the user who is running the job, especially that you plan to use nexus for repository.
You will have to change your jobs to use mvn deploy instead.
How can I make sure we don't run out of disk space on the server very
very quickly all the time?
Configure Jenkins/Nexus. Discard old builds and disable automatic artifact archiving. Both settings can be found in the Jenkins job-configuration. Also you could delete old artifacts automatically from Nexus using Scheduling Tasks.
There is no need to install the artifacts into the local maven repository when using Jenkins/Nexus on a dedicated server.
Is it possible in someway to configure my build job such that rather than picking maven artifacts from the central repo , it picks them from the local maven repo. residing on my system?
NOTE - I want others to be able to run build jobs via jenkins , while pointing to my fusion repo.
Thanks
If you want to share a maven repository with multiple users I recommend to use a repository manager see maven repository management. The mostly used once are Artifactory and Nexus. This can handle the central repo as well as own managed repositories by ThirdParties or by your self. They also work as proxy to reduce the bandwidth used in your organisation.
Much easier method to achieve local-only maven builds.
Just use the offline flag (-o):
mvn -o clean package
Maven will build off your local repo directly and will not pull down updates.
My current Jenkins deployment job retrieves war file generated from maven build process from Nexus repository. The deployment is done this way since I can not use hot deployment for my environments. Currently I used parameterized build with Jenkins so I can manually enter the version number for my artifact. Is there a way to configure Maven or Nexus so the artifact generate from the latest trunk build can be accessed from an static URL? For example:
http://mynexus:8081/nexus/content/repository/snapshots/com/somepackage/my-app/trunk/my-app-trunk.war
I don't know a way to do this in Nexus. But you can access the latest successful build from Jenkins, with a URL like this: http://localhost:8080/jenkins/job/jobname/lastSuccessfulBuild/my-app-trunk.war
You have to enable artifact archiving for your war file, then you can access it.
Same issue here, we discovered about :
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Maven+Deployment+Linker
Which does the job.
Hope that helps.
I'm trying to setup a complete CI server, but I struggle on some points.
Currently, my system work as follow :
I commit local changes on my local GIT repository, then push to the GIT repository on the CI server
I then have a jenkins job triggered by the SCM change, who run a clean install and by doing so executes all my Junit and Jstestdriver test (via a local jstd server). This job deploy the snapshot artifact to a repository on my nexus repository
I installed M2-release-plugin for jenkins, and setup my pom.xml accordingly using maven-release-plugin. When i click on "Perform maven release" in jenkins job page, jenkins run mvn release:prepare release:perform, thus creating a tag in my git repo (say v000001) and deploying a versionned artifact on my nexus repository.
I don't really know if this process is fine, but i guess so...
My problem is that I want to deliver the versionned artifact in my nexus repo (say "artifact-v0000001.war") in my production tomcat. But I can't figure out how to do it.
When I do "mvn release:prepare release:perform tomcat:deploy" it deploys the new SNAPSHOT artifact built ... I don't want to do this, I want to reuse the artifact from the nexus repository.
Is there a way to doing this using a tool (maven/jenkins plugin, or external)?
Basically, I want to fetch the last release artifact on the repository, and send it to the tomcat manager for dereploying the webapp.
Do I need to setup a delivery job separated from the release job?
Jenkins, especially when combined with a tool like ANT, can do just about anything. It has a lot of plug-ins, and you can always write a script and incorporate it into a Jenkins build. Currently, I use Jenkins to deploy web applications to Windows IIS servers. What you could do here is have a Jenkins build that has your SVN path set in the source control section so that it fetches the latest version when you trigger the build. From there it should be fairly trivial to write an ANT script that copies it over the existing JAR in Tomcat, which will automatically restart it.
Your problem is that you are probably using the Jenkins release plugin, not the "m2 release plugin". The problem with the standard plugin is that it performs the regular build, saves the artifacts, then performs the release. It will then try to deploy the wrong artifacts that it created from the regular build.
The m2 release plugin solves this particular problem. There are some tricky workaround for this problem, but that's how it stands at the moment until this feature is implemented: https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-11120 (log in and vote for it!)