Jenkins Online Meetup, 26 Jan 2022

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From YouTube: 2022 01 26 Development Environment for Jenkins Plugins

Description

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

A

Hi everyone welcome to um the jenkins online meetup. My name is alyssa tong. I am a longtime jenkins contributor in the areas of events and outreach.

A

Today we have a presentation by oli hoffner on how he eases the complexity and increased ramp up time for jenkins environment development, jenkins development, environment setup. His co-presenters are jean-marc mason, daryn, pope and mark waite.

A

I'll, let our presenters say hello and introduce themselves.

B

Hi, my name is willie hafner, I'm a long-time contributor to jenkins as well. I think it's almost 15 years now and I'm the author of the warnings plug in the git forensics plugin and yeah a couple of more plugins, I'm making in my real life, I'm a professor for software engineering at the university of science in munich here, and I'm teaching students, software engineering, software development and so on, and I'm using jenkins in my lectures to show them how to improve the quality of their code, and this is the presentation we are talking about today.

B

C

Hello, my name, my name is sean mark mason, I'm located in brussels in belgium and uh I'm helping out on the jenkins projects trying to help developers.

C

I've been for years senior, devops consultant and a long long time, uh jenkins user. Even in the time of hudson. In the beginning of that.

D

Hi, my name is darren pope I am a developer advocate for cloudbees and also co-host a podcast with victor farcek called devops paradox and uh I think mark- and I might end up talking about some of the things we did back in october today too,.

E

We may I'm mark waite, I'm the jenkins documentation officer and I've been using jenkins for a long time. I happen to also be one of the maintainers of the git plugin and I'm quite active in documentation and platform topics. Thanks alyssa.

A

Thanks mark um so before we dive into the presentation, I would like to highlight a couple of things: um some upcoming events um for jenkins. So in february we will be hosting a google summer of code 2022.

A

If you like to be a part of this program, we are looking for organizers, mentors project ideas. Please reach out to us. I will leave a link in the comment window on the meetup page after this event and we're always looking for presenters for our next online meetup, so we're planning to have more of these to bring helpful content to our community.

A

So if you're interested in speaking, you've got a great story, please reach out to us, there's more on this at a later slide in this deck.

A

In june, we are planning to be in austin texas, with cdcon, where we will host a jenkins contributor summit and again, if you have a great jenkins story, the cfp is currently open. Please submit your stories uh september. Devops world is the largest event for jenkins, and this is taking place in las vegas. This year again, we will have a contributor summit on site and we want to give a shout out to our sponsors, cloudbees and the cd foundation for hosting these events and allowing us to be part of their events.

A

So jenkins needs you.

A

We are always in need of technical and non-technical volunteers.

A

This is how you can participate in some of the programs. You know, there's there's organizations for meetup, there's translations for documentation.

A

There's testing coding, you name it we're always in need of volunteers. If you'd like to give back to the community, we'd be happy to have you and it's also a great place to meet good people.

A

Jenkins online meetup, as I mentioned earlier, this is a place where we hope to bring more jenkins helpful contents to the community. So if you have a story, please reach out to us, you can go to this link to find more about it.

A

So before I hand things over to ollie to start the session, just a couple of housekeeping items, this session is being recorded. We will post the link uh in the meetup page after the event, q. A please put your questions in the chat window throughout the presentation.

A

Our presenters will get to them throughout the presentation and, lastly, our code of conduct is fully enforced here and, if you don't know what that is simply being kind will do the job. So at this time I'll hand it over to oli.

B

Thank you and I will pin my video, so we see me in the full screen mode. So uh what does this talk about? uh I want to talk about uh the development environment I'm using uh for my students to just continue and start development in jenkins.

B

So, as already mentioned in my introduction, I'm using jenkins to show the students how to do continuous integration, continuous deployment, but I'm also using jenkins in my courses to see how an actual software application works.

B

How you develop the code, how you develop the tests and so on, students can use this code to improve their skills and we have also master thesis, bachelor thesis or some kind of exercises which work with jenkins, so the students can work with real code which, with real code they can review and where they can produce their pull requests and we integrate these pull requests in jenkins as well.

B

In these courses it was always a little bit difficult to start the course, because, typically, the development environment of everybody is a little bit different. Some people use windows, some use linux, some use mac os. This is always kind of difficult to get everybody. Having the same machine where we can start developing so one first step, what we are doing at the university of applied sciences here in munich is we hand out for each of our students a virtual machine with linux, and this virtual machine is not part of this talk now.

B

This is a kind of precondition. We give everybody a virtual machine which has bundle linux installed and every tool you need like maven git is already pre-installed. So if you have windows without docker, it does not really matter. You get this virtual machine and then you can start developing.

B

So this is for all of our courses. So this is nothing that comes from me. This colleague of mine is doing, and now I'm coming in and want to yeah develop plugins for tankins or to yeah show how jengkon's is working.

B

That means I also need some kind of setup how to build jenkins plugins, how to start jenkins and the and and see how these plugins actually behave, and this was a minor process in my first courses and yeah. After doing this course again and again, I meant and noticed this is better. If you have a setup which is easy to install on each student's machine, this has also a good side effect, I'm using the same setup for the contributors, a document of my warnings, plugin and of the code coverage plugin and of the forensics plugin.

B

So new contributors to my plugin also have the open opportunity to have a good setup of things we need when we want to develop jenkins plugins- and this is what I would like to show you a little bit in more detail today.

B

So uh the yeah. The topic is uh this github project project it is uh yeah currently still in my personal account. uh That's because I'm using it at the university and it's not uh yeah really from from the jenkins project, but yeah, I'm not sure if uh I should give that in the chat. So if someone did not see it again, this is uh the url of the of this development iron.

B

uh This project and this project basically contains all things we need for our development setup in jenkins, so just a brief sketch in the beginning. Basically, this environment consists of three things and I switch now to my screen.

B

Then you will see uh their project here in github, so in github we have this project and it contains a lot of files which are not so important. uh The important thing is so yeah in the beginning. uh What actually is part of this development setup and basically I have three items which are required for students to begin. The first thing is they need to know which is the actual code, which plugins would we like to develop the develop in jenkins, so my students work not in jenkins core.

B

We are always heading to development of champions plugins, so the first part which my development environment contains is a setup of all these plugins that are required for the students.

B

Currently, these are the warnings, plug-ins code coverage plug in the forensics plugin, and so on. We'll see it a little bit more in a couple of minutes and these plugins are automatically checked out, so the students do not need to worry. Where is the source code of the file? I have one script, provided that checks out all these modules.

B

These modules are currently just my module, so if you want to develop in the git plugin, for instance, you need to change those scripts, but this should not be really hard to do so. This is the first setup you get all the modules you need, then I have a multi maven project created which compiles all these projects and using these compiled projects, I've created an intelligent project which everybody can import in his workspace, so they just need to click import in intellij and wait a little bit until in intellij opens and indexed all files.

B

But then you can immediately start developing, and the last part, which is quite important for jenkins, is that when you're developing plugins, you want to see the results of your changes, and these results are best seen not only in unit tests, but they are best seen in an actual running jenkins instance, and therefore I also packaged in this development, environment and jenkins installation, which is already installed with a lot of plugins, I'm needing with a lot of jobs which already use these plugins, that the students will change.

B

And finally, what is also a part of this installation is: we have a jenkins controller, which runs only the user interface and we have and jenkins agent, which runs the actual bills.

B

This helps me to develop already for a complex installation where we need to have a distributed environment, and there are a lot of bugs coming if you are not testing it in a distributed environment. So this jenkins installation, as you will see later on, will use one agent and one controller.

B

Both are docker containers, so they are installed on your local machine, but there you have a good opportunity to debug your code in a distributed jenkins, environment.

E

You you just described what sounds like near nirvana for me, so as a as a plug-in developer, you're, providing a setup that that I can run jenkins, it's already got an agent configured, it's already got interesting jobs configured and I could potentially even offer additional jobs to that as a pull request to your to your repository.

B

Yes, this is possible, so I will show it now in in more detail what these elements are. So this is just the yeah introduction to so I think the best thing is. I show you now how you interact with all these three components, and then we see yeah how you can use them yeah if you want to contribute to jenkins or how we can extend them if we need different modules than the warnings plugin.

B

So the first thing you need is um you need a you know, a terminal where you can clone the code. um You yeah, you can use a good user interface as well, but I'm typically cloning, the repository on the command line, so you can use the github console, for instance here I'm I'm checking out the repository and cloning in on my machine, so this works with github console or you can use git clone yeah and clone it and under a different name.

B

B

And then I'm cloning, these modules, um that means after this clone command. I have this project, which I described here from github on my local machine and then I can start to build the project. So the first thing we need is the plugins we want to develop. So let's go to the folder.

B

And, let's see what we are in this folder, we here have a lot of scripts, but actually not many source code files. Yet because these source code files are not here.

B

What I need is I need to transfer all files from github to my local machine now and I'm using a simple shell script to get them from github. So I started using with github multi-skid modules, but that didn't really work out. So I'm just using a script and get all the modules of my plugins on my local machine and therefore I have one command which is called yes, clone, oops, sorry, clone repositories.

B

There is the possibility to use the git. If you have a git key in github, you can use, got get a clone repos shell script or if you only use ht pbs, you use the different command. So both commands are supported, and if you run this command, then I'm getting all the content. You need to start development.

B

That means all modules or all plugins from github, and if I press enter, then you need to see there are different clone steps right after each other, where we get from github the source code we need when we are going to develop the source code. These are now only my plugins. So if you need different plugins, you need to change these scripts.

B

E

Conceptually, could I offer a would you consider a long-term branch on your repository that might be dedicated to somebody else's plug-in, like the git plug-in yeah, that.

B

Might be a good idea, yeah, I'm not sure if it's possible to make it a parametrized. This is a little bit more work, but I think a different branch would be.

E

Simple: okay, great thank you so you're and you're you're open to that kind of thing. If, if I wanted to propose such a thing, you can you and I could discuss it through pull requests and what yeah yeah that will be fine.

B

So this is the first step now all my code is on my machine and now the code is will be compiled using a maven. That means I press now enter and now I'm using maven a compile for this project.

B

This takes a little bit. It takes, I think, almost 10 minutes on my machine, so I'll stop it here, and I prepared it already for you in in another window. So I'm switching to this window, where we are now finish. So we saved a lot of time because you see it's uh yeah, almost 10 minutes. The build typically requires- and it's quite important to start a full build of all these modules. You need, because I want to import this project now in intellij, and here you see all the plugins. I I'm I'm downloading.

B

This was my coding style. It was the static analysis model code coverage, api forensics api, though that's almost 10 modules, which are part of the setup I'm giving the students, and typically we can make a smaller setup for individual people, for instance like the git plugin. We just need the kit plug-in and maybe the git client plug-in.

B

I started with different branches for different use cases, but I then considered it's easier for me to have just a single branch with all my plugins and some students just use the analysis model placket package and some only the warnings plugin. So yeah, it's just easier for me to have 10 modules here in in one branch rather than having them individually and.

C

So so only you always start from the sources. These are the plugins of interest. Do you need other plugins, a more statical one where you use the released one or you always go from the sources.

B

I'm always going from the sources, because my courses are always about source code development, so we're writing tests or we're developing new functionality. So we need to have the source code.

B

Each of these source code has a lot of dependencies, of course, and they are automatically grabbed by maven and if I deploy these plugins in jenkins, the depending plugins are also automatically pulled. So, as we see later on. The jenkins instance already has a lot of plugins because of the transitive dependencies.

B

So after we compiled the source code, we can open the source code in intellij. This is the next step, so we need to compile them in advance because in jenkins we are generating a lot of source code during the maven process and intellij doesn't handle that quite well.

B

If you start intelligent without generating the messages, for instance, or the assertions et cetera, it's important to make a build first and then you can simply open the whole project in intellij.

B

When you open the project in intellij, I don't know if you already used intellij, then intellij is indexing all files. It takes also a couple of minutes. So what I have done is uh I installed started that step before the meeting, so we now have already the intellij project open.

B

So if you start this setup in intellij, you see this a few. That means yeah the readme on the right side and on the left side, you see the three of my projects and you see here the analysis model the code coverage plug in my coding style um yeah. This is something which is not related to jenkins, um I'm using a coding style for all my development courses, in where I have define, which checks time warnings are relevant, which spotbox warnings are relevant.

B

How do I want to format the code and I'm using it in jenkins as well, so it makes sense that this project is also part of here of this development environment. There are all so a lot of readmes and help content. It's only german available right now, because I'm using it for my students how they write unit tests or how they should write inheritance classes, and something like that.

B

So this is also part of this project, but not related to jenkins, and then you see here we have all these projects and you can open these projects, as you normally do. So this is the first thing we have in intellij. We have all sources here and what you need to notice is that all sources are currently bound to my or to tank, but to the champions repository.

B

That means not to your fork. So if you want to change code and create a pull request, you actually need to switch the remotes, so I'm not showing it here. How do you do that? So this is something yeah. You will get it's not so complicated to change the remote so that we that you, you need to press in github for the project and then you can yeah change the remote that means um in intellij.

B

We have the opportunity to debug the code, so you can open everything. Yeah, let's say warnings, oops,.

B

B

That's a little bit slow. My computer.

B

Let's see what the intellij is finding, actually it's finding nothing.

B

Okay, it's a little bit slow, my computer, I'm sorry about that. uh This docker running in the background zoom, is running in the background and the camera is running in the background, uh so yeah pretty busy yeah, it's quite busy. Now I'm it's getting a little bit noisy. So, let's see why it is not opening. I know. Okay. So now the um a class is open.

B

So you can hear start development and one thing what students typically start with the development is they run unit tests and therefore I provided a setup of junit runners for the students. That means, if I press the run dialog in intellij, you see that I have a lot of unit test runners pre-configured.

B

So, for instance, if you want to run the unit test of the analysis model project, you simply select here and then you see here in the background the progress bar is starting. Then all unit tests are automatically started.

B

This helps in the beginning, to see how, where are the unit tests? How do I start them? So I already provided a runner in intellij, where you can use these, where you can run these unit tests, and so these yeah.

C

These runners are provided in the topmost project that you you showed correct. Yes, this.

B

Is um I'm not sure if that's helpful, maybe and have a look here, so we have here an idea folder, um and we have some run configurations, and here are all these run. Configurations are stored. Okay, great! This makes it quite easy to enable code coverage how I would like to have it and yeah it's easier for students to start. If already is pre-configured yeah, I can get finicky to get them working yeah.

B

So I stopped the test here right now and show you the additional runners, I'm having I'm having a runners to run here all unit tests and I'm have yeah in in the warnings plug-in. I split the unit test in integration tests and unit tests because the integration tests are quite slow, so we can have the unit tests which take only one or two minutes and we can start the integration test separately which take, I think, 20 minutes.

B

So you don't need to wait every time the next runner we have is um I'm not sure how interesting is that for everybody? um All of my plugins have unit tests integration tests within running jenkins instance, but no user interface, and then we have also a user interface test using the acceptance test harness of jenkins, and these runners are also configured.

B

That means, if I run these ui tests here from this runner, then a firefox window will pop up and the ui tests will be automatically started.

B

B

These ui tests- I have one lecture, which is about the ui testing in jenkins and in this lecture we use this runners very often because we want to test in firefox and in chrome how yeah, how we can start them and how they behave.

E

And now uli have you found? Have you found that ui testing is successful for your students that they they find it productive and helpful using these kind of techniques? Yes,.

B

I I started with the acceptance test harness this was a little bit complicated because we have a separate project where we have these separate uh tests, but now I've integrated the user interface tests into the plugin itself. So these tests are part of the warnings plugin. They are part of the git forensics plugin, and in this semester we have some more tests for the code coverage plugin and for the junit plugin.

B

The pull requests are currently you're paying for my reviews, but they are provided for other plugins as well, and this helps not only the students to learn how to make ui tests. It also helps because I'm using these ui tests during the pull requests now.

B

So if someone provides a pull request for the warnings plug-in, for instance, if jenkins core is bumping, one version again, the next version, then I'm running all my ui tests and I'm looking if my ui tests or my code still works with the latest jenkins version, for instance,.

E

Now that surprises me, because there are many changes coming in the jenkins ui even now have you had? Has that been particularly disruptive for you or are you able to adapt? How is that how's? Your experience been there um the core.

B

Changes are still work. Everything is fine, that's really good. um The only thing is the acceptance test, harness breaks, but it broke. So I'm I'm using an older version of the acceptance test, harness which is running fine, but this is the nice concept of um the pandabot in in a github. So if there's a new version, I'll automatically get a pull request which will be verified and currently the acceptance test, pull request is broken, but the jacket's core pull requests are still okay, I'm not sure if this will work again.

B

If we have this open, pull request merge from the ui changes, so I'm not really sure.

E

Well, the people are taking their breath here. Yeah. Thank you for the work you're doing on it. Thanks very much.

B

So maybe I'm not sure if we have time for the ui tests to look into more into deeper, maybe we can can come to it a little bit later. So what I also want to show what helps my students is.

B

Yeah, maybe I should need to show the jenkins part first, um so we have a lot of uh runners here where you see jenkins agent, jenkins, controller, uh build and deploy analysis model, and- and these runners are also useful, but in order to show you what these runners are doing, I need to introduce the next topic of my talk, which is the actual jenkins instance, which I provided as well.

B

So, as already mentioned in the beginning, if you are using intellij, yes, you can start the integration tests, ui tests, everything you can start, but you actually want to see your code in action in your jenkins instance.

B

So I created in this project uh one additional folder, it's a docker folder and in this docker folder I have two docker files, one docker file for the agent, which is currently running java, 11 and the jenkins controller. These are quite simple, docker files which have been provided, I'm not sure mark. You are one of the contributors and yeah. I I use these files uh in my setup as well.

B

It is the latest jenkins version with an alpine image, and the agent is, I think, yeah a simple java agent and this docker container when you are starting it, let's head over or back to my scripts. So if you are here on, you are, we are already in the same uh analysis or in here is the same as warning staff, civil setup, and here I already cloned the modules that are part of my setup, and here we have a script to start this jenkins, which I'm using in my demonstration.

B

So you can well. This jenkin is configured with docker compose, so you could start it with stock or compose, but it was required that I need to make a little bit more uh scripts around it. So I'm using docker pull to get the latest uh lts or not lts. Sorry, I'm to get the latest version of jenkins every time, I'm starting it and then I'm using docker compose, and I need to set the user ids correctly. So because of my mac, somehow it doesn't work right. Well, so just a simple script wrapper script around docker.

B

So if I start the script, then jenkins is starting. That means I'm getting the latest jenkins version. Then the build image is built. So if you are doing this the first time it takes a little bit longer. Of course, um I already uh started that yesterday. So now everything is fine and now jenkin is starting, and this jenkins, um which is part of my environment, has all plug-ins. I am using typically in jenkins.

B

That means there's a git plug-in the github plug-in, and there are also these plugins. I want to change the warnings plug in the code coverage plugins, so I think all plugins, which are important and also some plugins, which are not actually important in a good instance, which we I need some testing uh plug-ins with where I can use for ui testing or where I can develop some artifacts and it's very helpful uh because I noted students it take a lot of time to install that jenkins version.

B

Then one thing is not happening, then they forgot some plug-ins. So here all plug-ins we need are pre-configured and you will see now when it's uh you know started still is a little bit unworking.

B

Then we can see how this jenkins instance behaves.

E

So so uli you've got the definition of this jenkins instance inside that docker directory, and it has all of the things that you need to define. Are there the the job definitions, the everything everything.

B

So we have this docker file. This is uh yeah, nothing special, uh I'm just installing the plugins. It's still the old script, but it just works so never change a running system uh and in this plugins all my plugins are defined, which I'm using and I'm using jenkins configuration as code to set up this plugin this instance and yeah. Let's make it a little bit bigger, so here yeah what I'm also need.

B

We, I need a connection to the agent because I already said I have a jenkins instance with an agent which is the second docker image. So this is also a simple um jenkins agent uh distribution and the only thing which is a little bit uh strange for everybody. This is just I need to talk with the agent and the controller.

B

I need to open debug parts as we will see later on and therefore yeah.

B

We have uh some a key cryptographic which is not actually a cryptography, because the key is just in our develop setup, so you won't use it in a real setup.

B

So everything is here in these docker files and when you start jenkins, then you get let's see if it's really. It's still not here, uh sorry, it takes a little bit, but this is a screen from a couple of hours ago and if you start with jenkins, then you have not only.

B

How is it called a chop dsl a plug-in, I'm using the job, dsl plugin, to get five chops into this jenkins, and these five jobs are actually using my plugins again. So I see these plugins in action.

B

um So this jenkins has these empty jobs. Now and now you can. The students can press the play button on each of these jobs and start everything with experimenting with.

C

B

C

There was a question in maybe just interrupt here. This environment is a complete workbench with several plugins uh uh installed um and in the question asked by mark uh mark mccullough is that? Are there any optimization you can think within your process that focus on the single uh plug-in development explain a bit. What was the choice to have multiple uh environment, multiple plug-in environments, rather than focusing on one single plug-in? um The.

B

The background is that in my research, I'm using the static analysis and code coverage, so one of my topics and these plugins depend on a lot of other plugins. So in order to measure the code quality uh between my current change and the or in the pull request, I need to make some delta computations, so I need to make one build, which is which I call the reference build and one built which is the actual build.

B

I am inspecting the pull request and I want to see how many new warnings we have from this bill to the reference bill and in order to compute this reference bill, I need another plugin and therefore all these elements I need in my daily work are part of this setup.

B

So if a student wants to improve the warnings plugin, the student needs more than one plugin. Even the static analysis. Plugin is divided into two plugins, the warnings plugin, which is, let's say, a jenkins dependent and the analysis model plug-in which actually parses the warnings is independent of changes, because I'm also using it in a github action without jenkins. So therefore, I also need two projects and one comes after the other, so I ended up in with 10 projects.

B

So I think it's seven projects now, but if you want to set it up for a different tool like it, you you know maybe in git you also. If you want to develop the git plugin, you also need to keep and get client plugin and maybe some additional ones as well. So I think jenkins development, if you're getting a little bit deeper. It's not so simple that you just need one plug in. You need more than one plugin and therefore I bundled a lot of them and not a lot, but those that I need.

C

Just as a small question about the docker installation, that's raised quite some interest. uh How are you handling the required credentials using configurations code or another? Yes,.

B

It's a configuration as code, let's switch to the screen, so I have these keys, so basically the agent and the controller talking using ssh- and I encoded this keys uh here in the yaml file, which is something you should never do in a productive environment but yeah for here. It's just fine, and so here is the key and I'm setting up the agent with this key, and this helps me to something which is very important when you are developing in this distributed environment.

B

I have a debugger port open for the controller and a debugger port opened for the for the agent. That means, if students change the code in jenkins, they can have this remote debugger attached and then they actually see the code stopping when the agent is hitting a break point. They see where they are actually in the code and they can inspect the agent running and the they can inspect the controller running, and these are, let's make it a little bit smaller.

B

So these runners I have uh shown in the beginning, we have one ancient remote debugger and one jenkins controller, remote debugger. So when I start these runners.

B

They you see, they are connected and they do nothing else. So when I'm now have looking at the user interface of jenkins, I can well. I can hear let's stop jenkins here right in the middle, and then you see, uh okay, where I am somewhere in the jenkins controller, and I can do the same thing for let's say.

B

One moment when I start the same runner from the agent, then you can debug the agent code and typically my warnings plug in uh is running on the agent, where the warnings are actually passed and then the elements are put back to the controller, and then I can see on the agent if everything is working and on the controller, everything is working.

E

And inside this single intellij instance that you're running you've got it talking to a debugger on the agent and talking to a debugger on the controller, so that, if you hit a breakpoint in either location, you get notified in your in intellij.

B

Yes, that is fine, and this is really important because otherwise you're always guessing- and I see a lot of students there. Where can I put my sys out and why is my suits out not showing and yeah here you can have real debugging on the agent and on the controller.

E

Yeah so you're showing your students how to do multi-process, multi-computer, debugging and diagnosis from inside the familiar world of their ide nice. It's very nice very nice.

B

And the last thing which is here is also some convenience, because I'm a little bit lazy. So when you want to change your plugins, you need to deploy these plugins to your jenkins instance.

C

So it was a question that interests christoph about so go ahead.

B

Okay, actually we deploy and what I'm not using. I must first say I'm not using a maven hpi run, because this is not working as I need it, so I'm deploying the plugins by building them on the command line and copying them into the docker container and then restarting the docker container.

B

So, okay, this is uh when you use one of these scripts, it will done for you automatically. So it basically is a script which goes on the console root calls maven install. Then it has a deletes. The old plugin from the docker container copies the new plug into the docker container and restarts the docker container.

B

So it's simple, but if you're doing it always on the command line, you sometimes think you work sorry, I did not ask you, oh no, you get bored or you.

C

You you, you do a typo and then yeah things broke yeah, they're, very, very neat and very interesting procedure.

B

So, let's see uh uh okay in the mid and now the the the actual instance now finished starting. So um if we want to see the results, then we can jump into and these uh yeah projects and yeah, it's still slow on my machine, and so you can have a look at the warnings plug in and typically, you can also get now break points. And if you want to have a break point um yeah, I did not prepare one, because it's now a little bit late in the era.

B

I think we need to keep a little bit focus on the time, but you can debug everything by switching back to intellij and- and you see here, the controller is still running. The agent is still running, so everything is under your control and it simplifies the development of such a complex infrastructure in jenkins.

B

So this is basically everything I wanted to show.

B

So maybe we can have a little better focus on questions.

C

Yeah there there's one question here from uh martin: uh a more general question which language do: students use for plug-in development, java, groovy.

B

Mixed sure we only use java, I'm not aware that anybody in the jenkins universe is using something different than java, because java is just working and I think all plugins are using.

E

Java now now, while you say java, there's a lot of javascript in the warnings next generation plugin, is that a complication for you? How have you been able to deal with javascript and the java world? That jenkins involves? I assume your students get involved in javascript also.

B

Yes, actually, the user interface of the warnings plug in the refreshment was made by a student, and she created this in in her bachelor thesis, and a lot of students are working on the front-end side in their companies where they are working. Besides the students besides and yeah, I think it's still easy to add javascript on the individual pages of a plugin.

B

It's a little bit more complicated. If you want to show your new user interface in a page which is used by several plugins in tanks, for instance, the job view- let's see um so this view is totally under control of my plug-in, so I'm using your bootstrap and I'm using e-charts and I'm using data tables here to use a different user interface as other plugins.

B

But when you get on the build page, for instance, this page yeah here it's a little bit more complicated and if you're getting to the uh top level view here now, it's just one build, though you see no trend charts, but this page is subdivided by several plug-ins. So it's a little bit more complicated to use javascript in here, but in an ideal jenkins world. I would like to have these scripts I'm using in my plugins, basically on top level of jenkins, so everybody can use bootstrap out of the box without configuring.

B

It a little bit strange currently.

D

I have one question about the vm yeah that you provide the students. Is that a hosted vm that they get to use, or are they expected to have the hardware to be able to run that vm.

B

um They have are expected to have the runway hardware on their own machines, so we are using an ansible script to create the virtual machine. We are deploying the the image on our university cloud location and the students can get it from there, but then they are.

B

They need to have a computer that runs virtual box or which yeah vmware.

D

Or whatever, what kind of specs do they need in order to be able to run this successfully.

B

Actually, we use it's just uh I think it's the. I have four gigabyte of memory uh requirements for the virtual machine and one cpu, and it is already working for them sometimes when they want to have ui tests with jenkins, uh and then we have docker in docker. Then it's getting complex and slow.

B

As you see on my machine today, if you're running too many applications in parallel, you need a new laptop.

E

Now we we got a question in in chat related to. Is there a local versus server profile that you would consider for development? When I see what you're doing it looks like you're doing what I think of as server profile anyway, is there? Are there other things you might consider for cloud-based agents or something or has has your development environment worked well, even though many of your users are deploying to cloud or kubernetes environments,.

B

Actually, those uh those parts I've never used yet, even in my uh the other problem is that I'm now almost at 10 years in university and I'm not in any business project anymore, which is now using every different technology. So actually I'm using it still in this old school. Let's say.

E

uh Environment well, but but have your, you certainly have thousands of users of the warnings ng plugin. There are thousands, probably tens of thousands. By now of users of that, have you had cases where you've had to diagnose problems that were uniquely cloud-centered or your environment has been able to. Let you diagnose any problem reports already: okay, yeah.

B

I think I can diagnose these projects with my setup, um but some problems just occur if they are in a cloud instance, for instance, the code coverage api transfers, the source code from the agent to the controller, which works quite well. If you are have an agent which is right near your server instance, and but if you are using it in a cloud instance, it's really slow. If you all transfer all your source code highlighted, but this is something yeah you you actually don't need to have a setup to reproduce you.

B

You can see the timings of the bug report and then you can think about it.

B

So my plugins are not so complicated that they need to use these complex, setups.

E

Thank you now. Do you envision that the setup you've got might be usable for someone who is beginning in google summer of code, for instance, maybe they're evaluating project ideas? Is this something that a relatively new person to the project could do or do they need to be one of your students in your classroom to in order to comprehend it.

B

Well, no, this is, I think this would be a quite an easy task for someone else, for instance google, summer of code. So I think it's not really hard to understand what I've done here. It's just a little a lot of work. It was but now, when it's now running you can just yeah it's kind of search and replace you need to replace some modules and you need to make a maven module a maven multi module, but this is yeah not really complicated and.

E

B

Oh go ahead. No sorry, the only part which a little bit more complex is the docker setup, because it was a hard time to get it with the ports and the communication. But that's working now you can inspect the controller on in intellij as well the file content so yeah. This is okay, but the rest is. I.

E

Think simple, so winding a little bit back to darren's question. One of the places we're considering is we're about to embark on the she-code africa contributor and as part of that, I'm worried that our, if I told them hey you need to use this virtual machine, is it going to be bigger than the machine that they've got available to host it? So you said you run in a four gig virtual machine and that's enough.

B

Yeah, mostly yeah, but.

B

I always say to students: it's better if you can run it on your own machine, of course, but then it's it takes normally two weeks before it works on their own machine. So it was easier for me to have this virtual machine which they are using in every other class. um So.

E

That's brilliant. Thank you. Thank you very much.

B

Especially if you are using windows and docker, you know it's hard it it's not always working as you want it.

E

A

A second those of.

E

Us those of us who love windows windows is my preferred platform. I don't know what you're saying. Oh sorry, that's great.

E

Well, uli, thank you so much we're we're approaching our end time. Thank you. Thank you. The the recording I'm looking forward to reviewing it again, looking at your your docker definitions, and you should expect change, pull requests coming from me to think about how can I help contributors to things that I maintain use your technique?

E

Compliments to in the chat.

B

Okay, there are questions uh after the meeting. I think we can use the community or the guitar channels uh how people would like to use.

A

Great, thank you uli. Thank you mark thanks, sir mark thanks darren and thank you everybody for joining us, um we'll post the recording to the meetup page shortly. So thanks all and we'll see you next time, bye.

C