Create Freestyle job in Jenkins | How to create Freestyle job in Jenkins to automate build and deployment to Tomcat

Jenkins is popular open source Continuous integration tool. It was written entirely in Java. Jenkins is a self-contained automation server used for automating builds, tests and deployment.

See below the steps for configuring Jenkins to automate the build and deployment for the project we already set up in GitHub. Let us see how to configure Jenkins to automate build and deployment:

pre-requisites:(please do this first before you start)

1. Make sure you configure maven installation under Jenkins-->manage Jenkins-> Global Tool Configuration. under maven installation. enter Maven3 as name, enter path of maven installation --> /usr/share/maven and uncheck install automatically option.

2. Also install SonarQube scanner,  deploy to container,  Jacoco plugins under Jenkins --> Manage Jenkins --> Manage plug-ins

Click on Available, type Sonarqube, select SonarQube scanner. Click on Install without restart.

SonarQube

Deploy to container

JaCoCo

Click on without restart.

3. Generate Personal Access Token(PSA) if you are using GitHub. Click here to learn how to generate that in GitHub and you can use your token as password.

steps to automate MyWebApp project in Jenkins:

1. Login to Jenkins. Click on New item.

2. Enter an item name --> select Free style project.
enter name as myFirstAutomateJob. click OK.

3. under source code mgmt, click git. enter your source code GitHub URL

Click on your repo, Copy the url from the browser. Paste the url as Repository URL below.

under credentials --> click Add- > select Jenkins -->  enter your GitHub userid and your PSA - Personal access token as password. You would have created PSA from pre-requisites (# 3) 

Add description as my SCM credentials.

Enter main as branch specifier or which ever branch you want to check out.

4. select that from drop down.

5. under build trigger click on poll scm, enter this value to check

for every 2 mins --> H/02 * * * *

6. Build --> Add build step --> invoke top level maven targets -->

select Maven3 from drop down and goal as clean install

7. Click on advanced, enter the path of POM file as --> MyWebApp/pom.xml

8. click on Add post build action, select Record Jacoco Code coverage report

  

9. click on Add post build action, select deploy war/ear to container.

 

      for WAR/EAR files enter as 
          **/*.war

in WAR/EAR files, leave context path empty

   10. click on Add container , select Tomcat 9.x

   11. click on add credentials, enter tomcat as user name and password as password.

      select it from drop down.

 

13. tomcat url should be --> http://your_public_dns_name:8080

click Apply, click Save

click on build now..It should build.

if there is any error, please check the console output. Most of the common error would be checking the path of Maven installation, valid credentials for GitHub or Tomcat. Also make sure you install the plug-ins.

After successful deployment, please make sure you check the output in Tomcat by going to browser and enter below URL

http://please_change_per_public_dns_name_of_EC2:8080/MyWebApp

You should see Hello World!!!

This is how you automate the builds and deployments using Jenkins and migrate applications to AWS.

You can watch the video of this lab here: