Importance of Jenkins & PHP Continuous Integration

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins is a open source automation application written in Java with plugins constructed for Continuous Integration purpose. Lets see the importance of Jenkins & PHP Continuous Integration. Jenkins is used to develop and test your software projects continuously making it easier for programmers to incorporate changes to your project, and making it easier for users to acquire a fresh build. Additionally, it allows you to continuously deliver your applications by incorporating with a large number of testing and installation technologies.

Together with Jenkins, organizations can accelerate the software development process through automation. Jenkins incorporates development life-cycle processes of all kinds, including build, document, test, package, stage, deploy, static analysis and much more.

Jenkins achieves Continuous Integration with the Support of plugins. Plugins allows the integration of Different DevOps stages. If you want to incorporate a particular tool, you have to install the plugins to get that tool. For example: Git, Maven 2 project, Amazon EC2, HTML publisher etc.

Advantages of Jenkins include:

• It’s an open source tool with great community service.
• Jenkins is easy to install.
• It’s 1000+ plugins to ease your work. If a plugin doesn’t exist, it is possible to code it and share with the community.
• It’s free of cost.
• It’s built with Java and consequently, it is portable to all the major platforms.

Let us take a look on these points.

Jenkins Key Metrics

Following are some details about Jenkins which makes it better compared to other Continuous Integration tools:

Adoption: Jenkins is widespread, with over 147,000 busy installations and over 1 million users around the globe.

Plugins: Jenkins is connected with well over 1,000 plugins which allow it to integrate with most of the development, testing and installation tools.

It is clear from the above points that Jenkins has a rather high demand internationally. Before we dive into Jenkins it is crucial to understand what is Continuous Integration and the reason why it was introduced.

What is Continuous Integration?

Continuous Integration is a development clinic in which the programmers are needed to commit changes to the source code in a shared repository a few times a day or more often. Every perpetrate made from the repository is then built. This allows the teams to discover the problems premature. Aside from that, depending on the Continuous Integration instrument, there are numerous other purposes like deploying the build application on the test server, providing the concerned teams together with the construct and test results .

Let us know its significance with a use-case.

Continuous Integration With Jenkins

It appears to be a perfect way to come up with a software, however this procedure has many defects.

Programmers have to wait until the comprehensive software is designed for the evaluation results.

There’s a high chance that the evaluation results may show numerous bugs. It had been hard for developers to find those bugs since they must look at the whole source code of this program.

It impedes the program delivery procedure.

Constant feedback pertaining to matters like architectural or programming problems, establish failures, evaluation status and document discharge uploads was lost because of which the grade of software may return.

The entire process was manual that raises the danger of failure.

It’s evident in the aforementioned issues that not only the program delivery process became slow but also the quality of applications also went . This also results in customer dissatisfaction. So to conquer such a chaos there was a dire need for a method to exist in which programmers can always trigger a construct and test for each and every change made from the source code. That is exactly what CI is about.

Importance of Jenkins & PHP continuous integration

Code quality

Every other argument for CI ends up in this class. Delivering high quality software is not a simple task, and CI is one of the greatest tools for assisting you in achieving that. It makes certain to run the tests and generate reports for code protection. Also it performs static analysis on your code and give you visual reports for it. This also provides you with strong metrics concerning the health of your code

Automation

When running tests automatically on each drive, you do not have the issue of evaluations not being conducted before a deploy due to human error. You could automate your whole installation process if you would like to as well.

Find bugs faster

Since you are performing continuous integration, then you do not have to think about a long integration period later. You can catch bugs earlier in the process and prioritize fixing them before they create any problems. It isn’t some magical silver bullet to Get Rid of germs, but it Permits You to react to them quicker

Reduces the release cycle

You increase confidence when you make sure builds pass all tests you’ve automatic, which allows for more efficient deployment. The distance between the regional environment and your production environment decreases.

Visibility and communication

With a procedure that’s open to everyone, you and your staff will be able to see what’s going on and speak about it with more ease. And with higher transparency comes the advantage of dense domain knowledge on some”specialists”, and spread the domain knowledge more even between team members.

Call this what you will, but I like the expression team pride. When you achieve a culture of pride for great quality code in your group, you have come a long way. I am not speaking about pride as in”I wrote this code, don’t fuck with it”, I am talking about”I wrote this code, it’s evaluations, is well recorded, nicely decoupled and doesn’t break the build. Let us discuss additional improvements on it”. Gathering as a team about code quality, taking pride in increasing the tendency of code coverage and decreasing the code style offences is a highly effective mentality.

Installation of Jenkins , PHP and Composer and other tools will explained and discussed in other article. Feel free to contact us for other development enquiries.