Hi everyone! I’ve reached the fifth week of my DevOps journey, and this week, I’ve been focusing on Jenkins, one of the most popular tools for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). Here’s what I’ve learned so far and how I’m applying it.

What is Jenkins?
Jenkins is an open-source automation tool that helps in building, testing, and deploying code automatically. It’s a cornerstone of DevOps workflows, making software delivery faster and more reliable.

Setting Up Jenkins
My first step this week was setting up Jenkins on a local machine. Here’s what I did:

Installed Jenkins: Followed the official documentation to install Jenkins and get it running.
Explored the Dashboard: Jenkins has a user-friendly web interface. I spent some time understanding the menus and features.
Added Plugins: Jenkins’ functionality is extended through plugins. I installed a few essentials, like Git and Pipeline plugins.
Building My First Pipeline
The highlight of the week was creating a basic Jenkins pipeline:

Freestyle Job: I started with a simple Freestyle project to pull code from a Git repository and print a “Hello, World!” message as a build step.
Pipeline Script: Next, I explored declarative pipelines using Groovy scripting. My pipeline cloned a GitHub repository, ran basic tests, and archived build artifacts.
Challenges and Wins
Understanding how Jenkins integrates with version control systems like Git took some trial and error. However, successfully running my first scripted pipeline was a big win! It was rewarding to see automation in action and realize the potential of CI/CD.