jenkins

For the past decade or so, I've been working to automate as much of a Jenkins server build process as possible. There are a few 'hacky' bits to doing so, like managing some Jenkins XML files (or if you really want to go crazy, storing your entire $JENKINS_HOME somewhere in a source control repository!).

One of the most annoying things about automating Jenkins is using the jenkins-cli.jar file to interact with Jenkins on the CLI. It doesn't come with any automated solution for authenticating with Jenkins, and is meant for running either on the same server where Jenkins is running, or really anywhere that has SSH access. I generally don't like putting any Jenkins bits (including the CLI tool) on servers outside the actual Jenkins instance itself, so I've traditionally used the --username and --password method of authenticating with jenkins-cli.

However, it seems those CLI flags were deprecated and removed at some point in the past few months (maybe around 2.130 or so?), and now I get the following error when running CLI commands that way:

MidCamp 2018 wrapped up with a bang today, as there was another year full of great training, sessions, and my favorite aspect, the 'hallway track' (where you go around and network between and during some sessions with tons of excellent Drupalists from the Midwest and around the country).

This year, I presented two sessions; one a co-presentation with Chris Urban titled Local Dev Environments for Dummies, the other a solo presentation titled Jenkins or: How I learned to stop worrying and love automation.

Embedded below are the video recordings of the sessions (recorded as always by the excellent Kevin Thull of Blue Drop Shop!):

One of my most popular Ansible roles is the geerlingguy.jenkins role, and for good reason—Jenkins is pretty much the premiere open source CI tool, and has been used for many years by Ops and Dev teams all over the place.

As Jenkins (or other CI tools) are adopted more fully for automating all aspects of infrastructure work, you begin to realize how important the Jenkins server(s) become to your daily operations. And then you realize you need CI for your CI. And you need to have version control and deployment processes for things like Jenkins updates, job updates, etc. The geerlingguy.jenkins role helps a lot with the main component of automating Jenkins install and configuration, and then you can add on top of that a task that copies config.xml files with each job definition into your $JENKINS_HOME to ensure every job and every configuration is in code...

Every few weeks, when some of my automated Jenkins build jobs are running (using Ansible and my Jenkins role on Ansible Galaxy), they hit an error while configuring Jenkins plugins. The error is something like:

tl;dr: Get the Vagrant profile for Drupal/PHP Continuous Integration Server from GitHub, and create a new VM (see the README on the GitHub project page). You now have a full-fledged Jenkins/Phing/SonarQube server for PHP/Drupal CI.

In this post, I'm going to explain how Jenkins, Phing and SonarQube can help you with your Drupal (or hany PHP-based project) deployments and code quality, and walk you through installing and configuring them to work with your codebase. Bear with me... it's a long post!

Code Deployment

If you manage more than one environment (say, a development server, a testing/staging server, and a live production server), you've probably had to deal with the frustration of deploying changes to your code to these servers.

In the old days, people used FTP and manually copied files from environment to environment. Then FTP clients became smarter, and allowed somewhat-intelligent file synchronization. Then, when version control software became the norm, people would use CVS, SVN, or more recently Git, to push or check out code to different servers.

All the aforementioned deployment methods involved a lot of manual labor, usually involving an FTP client or an SSH session. Modern server management tools like Ansible can help when there are more complicated environments, but wouldn't everything be much simpler if there were an easy way to deploy code to specific environments, especially if these deployments could be automated to either run on a schedule or whenever someone commits something to a particular branch?

Enter Jenkins. Jenkins is your deployment assistant on steroids. Jenkins works with a wide variety of tools, programming languages and systems, and allows the automation (or radical simplification) of tasks surrounding code changes and deployments.

In my particular case, I use a dedicated Jenkins server to monitor a specific repository, and when there are commits to a development branch, Jenkins checks out that branch from Git, runs some PHP code analysis tools on the codebase using Phing, archives the code and other assets in a .tar.gz file, then deploys the code to a development server and runs some drush commands to complete the deployment.

Static Code Analysis / Code Review

If you're a solo developer, and you're the only one planning on ever touching the code you write, you can use whatever coding standards you want—spacing, variable naming, file structure, class layout, etc. don't really matter.

But if you ever plan on sharing your code with others (as a contributed theme or module), or if you need to work on a shared codebase, or if there's ever a possibility you will pass on your code to a new developer, it's a good idea to follow coding standards and write good code that doesn't contain too many WTFs/min.