Installing and Securing Jenkins

Earlier this year, I wrote an article about PHP-CI, which you can use as a continuous integration tool for your PHP projects. Within this article I indicated I still liked Jenkins the most as a CI tool. Time to dive into Jenkins and see how we can set this up for our PHP project.

Introduction to Jenkins

The list of things that Jenkins has to offer is huge due to the rich plugin system it has. Basically, Jenkins is just a tool which connects all kinds of different tools and plugins together to create a report for you. For example, it can run PHPUnit and show you the results in a graph over time. It can check your PHP code for errors by running php -l. However, you can also let Jenkins build a project and output a zip file, which you can use to deploy your application. The advantage of this is that you get a complete zip file back to upgrade your production application without having to run tools like Composer or NPM on your production servers.

Jenkins can be used for many different applications. You can use it for web applications written in PHP, but also for software and mobile applications written in Java or any other language. This makes Jenkins a very versatile tool and very interesting for companies handling many different projects.

Because Jenkins has so many options and possibilities, it looks overwhelming for people to start using it. Within this series of articles, we will slowly work our way into Jenkins. We will start with the installation and setup. After that we will continue with analyzing a project. In the end, we will take a close look at numerous other plugins we can use to check the quality of our product.

We will mainly focus on the quality of the PHP code, but in the end we will also take a short look at analyzing our HTML, CSS and JavaScript which work in close harmony with PHP.

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by Peter Nijssen via SitePoint