Jenkinsfile Runner

Jenkinsfile Runner is an experiment to package Jenkins pipeline execution as a command line tool. The intend use cases include:

• Use Jenkins in Function-as-a-Service context
• Assist editing Jenkinsfile locally
• Integration test shared libraries

Build

Currently there's no released distribution, so you must first build this code:

mvn package

This will produce the distribution in app/target/appassembler.

Preparation

Find jenkins.war that represents the version of Jenkins that you'd like to use, then unzip it somewhere.

wget http://mirrors.jenkins.io/war/latest/jenkins.war
unzip jenkins.war -d /tmp/jenkins

Next, create a directory and assembls all the plugins that you'd like to use with the build. One way to do this is to run Jenkins setup wizard and install the default set of plugins. This is a gap intended to be filled with configuration as code

JENKINS_HOME=/tmp/plugins java -jar jenkins.war
# go to http://localhost:8080/, follow the installation step
# and install the recommended set of plugins

Usage

Say you have your Git repository checked out at ~/foo that contains Jenkinsfile and your source code. You can now run Jenkinsfile Runner like this:

$ cat ~/foo/Jenkinsfile
pipeline {
    agent any
    stages {
        stage('Build') {
            steps {
                echo 'Hello world!'
                sh 'ls -la'
            }
        }
    }
}

# Usage: jenkinsfile-runner <path to war> <path to plugins> <path to ws>
$ ./app/target/appassembler/bin/jenkinsfile-runner /tmp/jenkins /tmp/plugins ~/foo
Started
Running in Durability level: PERFORMANCE_OPTIMIZED
Running on Jenkins in /tmp/jenkinsTests.tmp/jenkins8090792616816810094test/workspace/job
[Pipeline] node
[Pipeline] {
[Pipeline] stage
[Pipeline] { (Declarative: Checkout SCM)
[Pipeline] checkout
[Pipeline] }
[Pipeline] // stage
[Pipeline] stage
[Pipeline] { (Build)
[Pipeline] echo
Hello world!
[Pipeline] sh
[job] Running shell script
+ ls -la
total 12
drwxrwxr-x 2 kohsuke kohsuke 4096 Feb 24 15:36 .
drwxrwxr-x 4 kohsuke kohsuke 4096 Feb 24 15:36 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kohsuke kohsuke    0 Feb 24 15:36 abc
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kohsuke kohsuke  179 Feb 24 15:36 Jenkinsfile
[Pipeline] }
[Pipeline] // stage
[Pipeline] }
[Pipeline] // node
[Pipeline] End of Pipeline
Finished: SUCCESS

The exit code reflects the result of the build. The test directory of this workspace includes a very simple example of Jenkinsfile that can be used to demo Jenkinsfile Runner.

Further reading

• Packaging into Docker image
• Implementation Note