Getting Started With Jenkins and Puppet

If you’ve followed my blog, you’ve seen that I enjoy using Travis CI to run my Puppet RSPEC tests on the control repo or against component modules. When you create a PR, Travis starts a build and adds some links to the PR notes to the builds. When it’s complete, the PR is updated to let you know whether the build was successful or not. You can also configure your repo to prevent merges unless the build succeeds. The best part is that it “just works” — you never have to worry about upgrading Travis or patching it or really anything other than making sure you enabled it. It’s a pretty awesome system, especially since it is absolutely free for open-source projects. I do love Travis!

However, Travis isn’t always available and isn’t always the answer. Travis only runs against PRs or (typically) merges into the default branch. It won’t run on a schedule, even if your code never changed, which can help test any dynamic dependencies you might have (whether you should have any is a different topic!). It runs on a limited subset of OSes that Travis supports. You have to use GitHub and public repos to hit the free tier. If your control repo is private, there’s a different Travis site to use and there is no free plan, though there is a limited number of trial builds to get you started. After that, it can be pretty pricey, starting at one concurrent build for $69/month. This is great for a business, but most of us can’t afford $840 a year for the home network. It’s also, by itself, somewhat limited in how you can integrate it. It can be part of a pipeline, but it just receives a change and sends a status back to GitHub; it won’t notify another system itself. You have to build that yourself.

There are a ton of other Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery systems out there, though. They can be cheaper, have better integrations, run on your own hardware or cloud, and don’t have to require GitHub. Among the myriad options available, I chose to look at Jenkins, with the RTyler/Jenkins Puppet module. I can run this on my own VM in my home lab (hardware/cloud), and it can integrate with GitHub private repos ($0) or BitBucket (doesn’t require Github). CloudBees also discussed a new Puppet Enterprise Pipeline plugin at PuppetConf 2016, which is really appealing to me (better integrations). I can also have it run builds on a schedule, so if dependencies change out from underneath me, I’m alerted when that happens, not when I run my first test a month after the underlying change.

I’m very new to Jenkins and I’m going to do a lot of things wrong while testing it, but I’m going to start blogging about my experiences as I go, right or wrong, and then try and do a wrap-up article once I learn more and have a fully working solution. I’ve been inspired to do this by Julia Evans and her wonderful technical articles that are more about the exploration of technology. That goes against my normal style of figuring it all out first, but I so love to see the exploration of others and hope you will, too! As we go on this journey, please feel free to educate or correct me in the comments and on Twitter, as always.