Java CI/CD: From Local Build to Jenkins Continuous Integration

In this blog post, we’ll learn how to configure Jenkins to build and publish our Docker image. Read on to find out more!

This post is part of a series that demonstrates a sample deployment pipeline with Jenkins, Docker, and Octopus:

• From JAR to Docker
• From local builds to Continuous Integration
• From Continuous Integration to Kubernetes deployments
• From Continuous Integration to release management
• From release management to operations

In the previous post, we took a typical Java application and created a Dockerfile that takes care of building the code and running the resulting JAR file. By leveraging the existing Docker images provided by tools like Maven and Java itself, we created a repeatable and self-contained build process, and the resulting Docker image can be executed by anyone with only Docker installed.

This is a solid foundation for our build process. However, as more developers start working on a shared codebase, testing requirements expand, and the resulting packages grow in size, teams require a central shared server to manage builds. This is the role of a Continuous Integration (CI) server.

There are many CI servers available. One of the most popular is Jenkins, which is a free and open-source. In this blog post, we’ll learn how to configure Jenkins to build and publish our Docker image.

Getting Started With Jenkins

The easiest way to get started with Jenkins is to use their Docker image. Just as we created a self-contained image for our own application in the previous blog post, the Jenkins Docker image provides us with the ability to launch Jenkins in a pre-configured and self-contained environment with just a few commands.

To start, we download the latest long term support (LTS) version of the Jenkins Docker image with the command:

docker pull jenkins/jenkins:lts

We then launch Jenkins with the command:

docker run -p 8081:8080 -p 50000:50000 -v 

jenkins_home:/var/jenkins_home jenkins/jenkins:lts

The -p argument binds a port from the local workstation to a port exposed by the image. Here we use the argument -p 8081:8080 to bind local port 8081 to the container port 8080. Note that because our own PetClinic application also listens to port 8080 by default, we’ve chosen the next available port of 8081 for Jenkins. It is entirely up to you which local port is mapped to the container port. The argument -p 50000:50000 exposes a port used by Jenkins agents, which we will configure to perform our build later in the post.

The -v argument mounts a Docker volume to a path in the container. While a Docker container can modify data while it runs, it is best to assume you will not be able to retain those changes. For example, each time you call docker run (which you may do to use an updated version of the Jenkins Docker image), a new container is created without any of the data that was modified by a previous container. Docker volumes allow us to retain modified data by exposing a persistent file system that can be shared between containers. In this example, we have created a volume called jenkins_home and mounted it to the directory /var/jenkins_home. This means that all of the Jenkins data is captured in a persistent volume.

java tutorial integration jenkins ci/cd dockerfile docker image

This post is part of a series that demonstrates a sample deployment pipeline with Jenkins, Docker, and Octopus.

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