I think Jenkinsfile Runner brings a lot of opportunities for pipeline
developers. The most obvious ones to me are
1. Pipeline development (Jenkinsfile)
2. Shared library development
*Pipeline development*
Right now (as described by others in this thread) pipeline development is
either a loop of committing / fixing pipelines on production Jenkins, using
pipeline replay on production Jenkins or setting up a local instance
manually.
With Jenkinsfile Runner we can get faster feedback without polluting our
commit or Jenkins build history and don't have to set up a local instance
manually.
*Shared library development*
Shared library development right now works much in the same as pipeline
development, except that you have the library code and another (often
production) Jenkinsfile to maintain, in order to try out (as opposed to
automatically test) your Jenkinsfile.
For shared libraries, we thankfully already have JenkinsPipelineUnit, that
makes it easier to implement some tests. However, (as also mentioned by
others in this thread) this is unit testing only. It mocks most of our
environment. Often, green unit tests mean nothing for productive use of our
share library. I even gave up test-driven development for shared libraries,
in favor of 90s try-and-error-style programming. Because most of the time
when trying the library with green unit tests in production, it turns out
that the real Jenkins environment has some restriction that is beyond the
scope of JenkinsPieplineUnit (e.g. sandboxing).
Worst thing about the current state is that we don't have reliable
regression tests. A change in shared library with green unit tests is far
from convincing me that the library will continue to work in production.
With Jenkinsfile Runner we could write small Jenkinsfiles within the shared
library repo's test folder and run them from the Jenkinsfile of the shared
lib. Pretty much in the same way as we use Maven Invoker Plugin (as
mentioned by Jesse) when developing maven plugins.
*A first approach to shared library integration testing with Jenkinsfile
Runner*
My naive first approach was to build a Docker Image that contains
Jenkinsfile Runner and all default plugins.
docker run -v~/src/it/myfunction:/workspace schnatterer/jenkinsfile-runner:
1.0-SNAPSHOT-2.108 /workspace
runs the ~/foo/Jenkinsfile using Jenkinsfile Runner with all default
plugins of Jenkins 2.108.
My idea was to eventually do the same in Jenkinsfile of the shared lib like
so (not tested)
docker.image('schnatterer/jenkinsfile-runner:1.0-SNAPSHOT-2.108').inside {
sh 'jenkinsfile-runner /app/jenkins /app/plugins src/it/myfunction'
}
or
sh 'docker run --rm -v $(pwd):$(pwd) src/it/myfunction'
It turned out that there a two major problems:
1. There's no way to add non-default Jenkins plugins.
My local test for cloudogu/ces-build-lib
<https://github.com/cloudogu/ces-build-lib> failed because there was no
GitHub Groovy Libraries plugin.
Here, my hope is that Configuration-as-code plugin might help automate
loading plugins.
2. There's still no way to load a "local" shared library from the same
repo. So, we still would have to find a way to configure the shared library
in our Jenkinsfile Runner.
Loading local shared libraries has already been discussed here
<https://github.com/jenkinsci/workflow-cps-global-lib-plugin/pull/37>
and there <https://stackoverflow.com/q/46213913/1845976>.
Once those issues are solved, we'll have a very basic way of automating
integration tests for shared libraries by executing IT Jenkinsfiles from
the shared libraries pipeline and failing the build if the IT fails.
Of course, this would be very basic testing. For more sophistiated testing
we would want to
- trigger the ITs from maven or gradle,
- use asserts,
- get the results as JUnit XML.
So, yes, we're not there yet. But we now have a foundation to build all
this upon.
Thanks for that & best regards,
Johannes
Am Donnerstag, 1. März 2018 20:23:15 UTC+1 schrieb Kohsuke Kawaguchi:
>
> 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
>
> Over the past year, I've done some deep-dive 1:1 conversations with some
> Jenkins users and I felt something like this might move the needle for them
> in an important way.
>
> I'd love to hear any reactions on your side. Could something like this be
> important for you, does it miss any key points for you? If you mentally
> picture a perfect version of this, what would that do, and how would you
> use?
>
> Let me know!
>
> --
> Kohsuke Kawaguchi
>
Am Donnerstag, 1. März 2018 20:23:15 UTC+1 schrieb Kohsuke Kawaguchi:
>
> 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
>
> Over the past year, I've done some deep-dive 1:1 conversations with some
> Jenkins users and I felt something like this might move the needle for them
> in an important way.
>
> I'd love to hear any reactions on your side. Could something like this be
> important for you, does it miss any key points for you? If you mentally
> picture a perfect version of this, what would that do, and how would you
> use?
>
> Let me know!
>
> --
> Kohsuke Kawaguchi
>
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