Jenkins for Ubuntu Natty: Call for Testing

Many of you may have wondered what I have been doing since UDS-N; some of you may have know that I have been working on packaging Jenkins (nee Hudson) from source along with all of its build dependencies (all 80 of them).

After just over 3 months I’ve managed to get a 99% built from source Jenkins into the Hudson Ubuntu Testing PPA; this is core Jenkins only at this point in time; no plugins come bundled (although you can still install them using the Plugin Manager).

Note that the PPA only provides packages for the Natty Narwhal development release.

If you want to help out with testing, read on….

Getting started

So first things first; lets add the Jenkins testing PPA and install the jenkins package:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hudson-ubuntu/testing
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install jenkins

Wait some time and Jenkins should be up and running.

Accessing Jenkins

Once the package has installed you should be able to access Jenkins on http://localhost:8080 (or whatever server you installed it on).

Jenkins comes completely empty; no jobs, minimal configuration, no security.  Follow the normal Jenkins ‘Use Jenkins‘ guide to get started.

Reporting problems

This is a testing package so it ain’t going to be perfect. Please join the hudson-ubuntu-users team and subscribe to the mailing list on launchpad to discuss general issues and report problems.

You can also find me (jamespage) in #ubuntu-server on Freenode if you like to use IRC.

Whats still todo?

Well as I said this is 99% built from source; a few packages are either binary packages (built from jars) or packages that bundle their dependencies in the upstream source bundle. I’m working with upstream(s) to get these issues sorted.

That said, everything that is installed on your server or desktop in the jenkins package IS built from source. Offending packages are either used for testing or generating documentation during library builds.

I’m also going to start working on packaging a few core plugins from source (see the associated blueprint for details); for the time being you can download and install from within Jenkins. I will also create a patch so that this feature can be disable if required.  Please feel free to apply to join the team if you want to package a plugin.

The Future

Well ultimately probably the main Ubuntu archive and Debian; but lets leave that until next release….

And if you were wondering, Hudson renamed itself to Jenkins in late January (hence the Hudson name keeps creeping into this post).