Table of contents
What is Pipeline?
A pipeline is a collection of jobs that brings the software from version control into the hands of the end users by using automation tools. It is a feature used to incorporate continuous delivery in our software development workflow.
Over the years, there have been multiple Jenkins pipeline releases including, Jenkins Build flow, Jenkins Build Pipeline plugin, Jenkins Workflow, etc.
Declarative Pipeline: Declarative is a more recent and advanced implementation of a pipeline as a code.
Scripted Pipeline: Scripted was the first and most traditional implementation of the pipeline as a code in Jenkins. It was designed as a general-purpose DSL (Domain Specific Language) built with Groovy.
Why you should have a Pipeline:
The definition of a Jenkins Pipeline is written into a text file (called a Jenkinsfile) which in turn can be committed to a project’s source control repository.
This is the foundation of "Pipeline-as-code"; treating the CD pipeline as a part of the application to be versioned and reviewed like any other code.
Creating a Jenkinsfile and committing it to source control provides several immediate benefits:
Automatically creates a Pipeline build process for all branches and pull requests.
Code review/iteration on the Pipeline (along with the remaining source code).
Pipeline syntax:
pipeline {
agent any
stages {
stage('Build') {
steps {
//
}
}
stage('Test') {
steps {
//
}
}
stage('Deploy') {
steps {
//
}
}
}
}