How could I automate build deploy in jenkins?
We are using jenkins for CI. we get late night builds. Is there any way to automate the build deploy as soon as we get a mail or intimation ? Any suggestions would be appreciated..
Answer
One mechanism to deploy off of a build on Jenkins is to use artifacts to place the latest binary in a known location, and then kick off a new job (only on success of the compile/test phase) which uses (private key protected) ssh or scp to copy the artifacts to the test/production machine and then perform the install.
We use a similar mechanism for some automated testing that we do. The tricky part is getting the shell command to handle the ssh keys, so we do the following:
eval `ssh-agent -s`
ssh-add ~/.ssh/your_private_key_here
As long as that private key is on the Jenkins server and the public key is on the server you're trying to push to, you can then use ssh and scp commands in the rest of the script to perform functions on the server in question.
If you prefer to run the process entirely from the target server end, you can create a small script that runs on the server that checks for new files in the artifact directory of your Jenkins server build. Thanks to the latest path, you don't have to know the build number to do this. To find the specific path, you can log in to your Jenkins server (once you've saved at least one artifact), and find the project you are using and look at the Last Successful Artifacts, which will be URLs to the last successful builds of the artifacts. These URLs remain constant and always point at the most recent successful build, so you don't have to worry about them changing unless the project name or server name changes.
NOTE: there are security holes here that you can drive a truck through if you are doing this for anything other than a deployment to test. In the case of the first mechanism, your build server has an ssh key that gives it access (potentially destructive) to the target. In the case of the second mechanism, you are trusting that the Jenkins server will only serve up binaries that are good for you. However, for test environments, push to stage, etc. these techniques will work well.