CI/CD Pipeline using Groovy

4 min readSep 29, 2020

Apache Groovy is an object-oriented programming language used for JVM platform. This dynamic language has a lot of features drawing inspiration from Python, Smalltalk & Ruby. It can be used to orchestrate your pipeline in Jenkins and it can glue different languages together meaning that teams in your project can be contributing in different languages.

It is a powerful, optionally typed and dynamic language, with static-typing and static compilation capabilities, for the Java platform aimed at improving developer productivity thanks to a concise, familiar and easy to learn syntax. It integrates smoothly with any Java program, and immediately delivers to your application powerful features, including scripting capabilities, Domain-Specific Language authoring, runtime and compile-time meta-programming and functional programming.

Continuous integration (CI) is a software engineering practice where members of a team integrate their work with increasing frequency. In keeping with CI practice, teams strive to integrate at least daily and even hourly, approaching integration that occurs “continuous-ly.”Historically, integration has been a costly engineering activity. So, to avoid thrash, CI emphasizes automation tools that drive build and test, ultimately focusing on achieving a software-defined life cycle. When CI is successful, build and integration effort drops, and teams can detect integration errors as quickly as practical.

Continuous delivery (CD) is to packaging and deployment what CI is to build and test. Teams practicing CD can build, configure, and package software and orchestrate its deployment in such a way that it can be released to production in a software-defined manner (low cost, high automation) at any time. High-functioning CI/CD practices directly facilitate agile development because software change reaches production more frequently. As a result, customers have more opportunities to experience and provide feedback on change.

Task Description :

1. Create container image that’s has Jenkins installed using dockerfile Or You can use the Jenkins Server on RHEL 8/7
2. When we launch this image, it should automatically starts Jenkins service in the container.
3. Create a job chain of job1, job2, job3 and job4 using build pipeline plugin in Jenkins
4. Job2 ( Seed Job ) : Pull the Github repo automatically when some developers push repo to Github.
5. Further on jobs should be pipeline using written code using Groovy language by the developer
6. Job1 :
1. By looking at the code or program file, Jenkins should automatically start the respective language interpreter installed image container to deploy code on top of Kubernetes ( eg. If code is of PHP, then Jenkins should start the container that has PHP already installed )
2. Expose your pod so that testing team could perform the testing on the pod
3. Make the data to remain persistent using PVC ( If server collects some data like logs, other user information )
7. Job3 : Test your app if it is working or not.
8. Job4 : if app is not working , then send email to developer with error messages and redeploy the application after code is being edited by the developer.

So let’s begin:

First of all we create a job chain of job1, job2, job3 and job4 using build pipeline plugin in Jenkins . I have created a Jenkins file for all the jobs and build pipeline view using Groovy . Seed job will pull the script and form other 4 jobs. It will copy the script form GitHub.

To process Job DSL we need to specify the DSL script “task6.groovy” and we have to approve the script first .

Go to >> Manage Jenkins >> In-process Script Approval >> Approve

emxkd/dev-task6-code

Contribute to emxkd/dev-task6-code development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

JOB1:

We have to provide the GitHub repo link and I have used Poll SCM as trigger so that whenever developer uploads a code in the GitHub, jenkins automatically download it and build the JOB .