Tag Archives: jenkins

Kicking Jenkins with monit

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We've been using Jenkins to build and test all our projects for a good part of this year now. I think Jenkins is one of the very few Java projects I've seen and worked with that actually works and it's a real pleasure to use. Except every now and then it seems to crash without reason..

I haven't had time to dig into this problem yet. I've only seen the frontend Apache process logging errors because it cannot connect to the Tomcat backend on port 8080. My theory so far is that Jenkins tries to auto-update and crashes, or maybe there's a runaway test run that brings everything down…

Time is really limited these days, and I have heard good things about monit, I decided to try it to see if we could have Jenkins kicked when it dies for some reason. In this way we can avoid cases where the test suites haven't been running for a day or two and nobody noticed… :-|

So, long story short, here's the quick and dirty monit recipe to kick Apache + Jenkins (this is on Debian Squeeze):

check process jenkins with pidfile /var/run/jenkins/jenkins.pid
  start program = "/etc/init.d/jenkins start" with timeout 90 seconds
  stop program  = "/etc/init.d/jenkins stop"
  if failed host my.host.name port 8080 protocol http
     and request "/"
     then restart

check process apache with pidfile /var/run/apache2.pid
  start program = "/etc/init.d/apache2 start" with timeout 60 seconds
  stop program  = "/etc/init.d/apache2 stop"
  if failed host my.host.name port 80 protocol http
     and request "/"
     then restart

And, just for kicks, a complete Monit module for puppet up on Github. Have fun!

Continuous integration of Perl-based projects in Hudson/Jenkins

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I didn't find massive amounts of information about how to link any Perl-based project to Jenkins for continuous integration, but there's a few presentations on Slideshare that carry some nice ideas.

While some older pages say that "there's no out-of-the-box integration, etc…", I think there is. A very simple, very straight-forward way to integrate any (Perl) project that uses TAP into Jenkins.

TAP::Harness::JUnit

Here we go then:

TAP::Harness::JUnit will capture all the standard TAP output and turn it into the default JUnit XML output that Jenkins expects. And you don't need to do anything to make this happen. How cool is that? Read below.

Build instructions

You need to instruct Jenkins on how to build your project. So, in the "Build" panel, I usually put:

prove -I ./lib -v

If you don't use prove, be ashamed and start using it :) You'll never look back. So, getting Jenkins to understand TAP is just a matter of modifying that command to read:

prove -I ./lib -v --harness=TAP::Harness::JUnit

Here's the actual Build panel screenshot:

That's it. prove will produce a junit_output.xml file with the JUnit-compatible XML output that corresponds to the standard TAP output.

Post-build actions

Now you need to tell Jenkins that the file is actually there. I'm not sure why, but this is not automatic. You need to tell it to "Publish JUnit test results". Now, if you ask me that's totally surprising, but it works. So:

That should be it. Run your build and you should see your tests output picked up.