Jenkins / Core Maintenance

Ulli Hafner shares the techniques that he uses to help students in his courses at the Munich University of Applied Sciences as they use Jenkins plugin development as part of their coursework.

His configuration is available from https://github.com/uhafner/warnings-ng-plugin-devenv#readme

00:00 Welcome and introductions
06:20 Introduction to a development environment for Jenkins
10:20 Three components - scripts, containers, and an IntelliJ project
12:55 Using Jenkins interactively in the development environment
15:00 Using the development environment
28:00 Additional runners for unit tests, integration tests, and UI tests
37:09 Configuration as code for the development environment
44:06 Debugging controllers and agents in the development environment

Jenkins 2.235.1 is the most recent Jenkins long term support release. We will introduce the new features in 2.235.1 and review how you can best use them: Plugin manager UX improvements, User interface refinement, new System read and Manage permissions. We will also talk about what's next in the Jenkins core.

Presenters: Mark Waite, Tim Jacomb, Mike Cirioli, Oleg Nenashev. Date: June 25, 2020

References:

* Slides: https://bit.ly/new-in-jenkins-2-235
* Jenkins 2.235.1 changelog: https://www.jenkins.io/changelog-stable/#v2.235.1
* Jenkins 2.235.1 upgrade guide: https://www.jenkins.io/doc/upgrade-guide/2.235/#upgrading-to-jenkins-lts-2-235-1

Maven is widely used for Jenkins plugin development, more than 90% of plugins use it. In order to simplify plugin development, the Jenkins project offers a standard Parent POM which defines the recommended build, verification and release flow. Such parent POM helps us to ensure quality of the Jenkins plugins. In April 2020 we released a new major release of the parent POM which includes a number of important and sometimes incompatible changes: Jenkins core Bill of materials, full migration to SpotBugs, etc.

In this presentation James Nord from CloudBees will talk about the changes introduced in Plugin POM 4.0. What do plugin developers and users get by upgrading? How to upgrade? What obstacles to expect, and how to resolve them?

Links:
* Slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uQaEA_EYk3g1D_QoJXK_0VujQtnhD4zq/view?usp=sharing
* Plugin Parent POM repository: https://github.com/jenkinsci/plugin-pom
* 4.0 changelog: https://github.com/jenkinsci/plugin-pom/releases/tag/plugin-4.0

Jenkins project uses Windows Service Wrapper (WinSW) to install Jenkins masters and agents as services on Windows. This year we have a GSoC project targeting better configuration management with YAML, and better configuration validation. https://www.jenkins.io/projects/gsoc/2020/projects/winsw-yaml-configs/ . So we will be doing a code dive into this component:

* How does Jenkins use Windows services?
* How is Windows Service Wrapper organized internally? https://github.com/winsw/winsw (.NET, C#)
* How could we improve WinSW configuration implementation?

We had serious regressions in the 2.204.x LTS baseline starting from 2.204.3 which was released on Feb 28 (changelog). We held a retrospective to to discuss what we could do better in the next releases to prevent such issues from happening again.

Discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jenkinsci-dev/d9lgjbruRno . Retrospective document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NzR1XtkCfk6MDSD1jRq5H-iPSjqKvP-pfUO0b9lVZ9k/edit?usp=sharing