Category Archives: Jenkins

AWS CodeBuild + Bitbucket – Teams = Epic Fail

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Updated 8/19/2017: Amazon has now updated AWS CodeBuild service to support Teams! In other words, in the 2 days since I posted this issue, it has now been fixed. Hooray! I now see my team projects in the list of repositories after linking my account. One minor nitpick though… They sort the list of repositories in the drop-down chronologically, not alphabetically. Since I have hundreds of repositories, that means in order to find a particular one I have to remember the order it was created. Hope they fix this (minor) issue too!

As a user of both Bitbucket and AWS, I was recently excited to hear Amazon had announced integration with both AWS CloudBuild and Atlassian Bitbucket. For those unfamiliar with these two products, AWS CloudBuild is part of Amazon’s suite of code automation CI/CD toolset. This service, along with the full suite, provides the ability to automate software build creation, testing, and deployment. Atlassian Bitbucket, on the other hand, is a large source code repository provider. The AWS announcement means that you can now build projects in AWS using Bitbucket repositories as the source.


Or that’s what it was supposed to mean… Apparently, no one told AWS that most professional software development companies use Bitbucket Teams to manage projects. The new AWS integration is accomplished using an OAuth authenticated sign-in from within the AWS CodeBuild project creation wizard. Unfortunately, after logging in it only allows two types of repositories to be selected: public repositories and those in your *personal* account. Most people using Bitbucket professional use teams and do not store the repositories in their personal account. The result is that no repositories are available for integration.

In other words… it’s broken. One solution would be to authenticate with the team login but Atlassian disabled the ability to login with the team account years ago. Now, Amazon only announced this feature recently, so it is possible they will get around to fixing it but in the short-term it is quite disappointing. While there are other ways to integrate AWS CodeDeploy and Bitbucket, I was looking for an all-in-one solution. In fact, when I recently tried Atlassian’s plugin to integrate one of my repositories into AWS CodeBuild, the web page just froze. Oh well, hopefully Amazon will fix this oversight soon!

By the way, you might ask, “Why I don’t just move my source code repository into AWS CodeCommit?” The answer is simple logistics. If I have hundreds of projects used by hundreds of developers, migrating them to a new repository is not easy/fun. The advantage of having this integration working is that it provides a nice, fluid transition toward migrating to AWS builds, without the commitment of actually transferring any repositories.

installing the software for the jenkins certification exam

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I didn’t have Jenkins on my home machine. While I do use it at CodeRanch and at work, I can’t just make changes because I feel like experimenting so installed locally. So I installed Jenkins on my home computer so I could practice for the Jenkins certification exam. The first thing I did was download the version in the study guide.

Also, see my main blog post about the Jenkins certification exam

Note: this is an old version with known security issues but it is what the PDF says questions were created against so using it anyway.

Installing Jenkins Enterprise

Since it was local and just for playing, I don’t need a servlet container and could just kick it off. Nice and easy:

  1. Download war from http://mirrors.jenkins-ci.org/war/1.625/
  2. java -jar jenkins.war
  3. Launch at http://localhost:8080

Note: <home>/.jenkins has all data from this test install

Then I installed the Jenkins Enterprise edition using the evaluation license. I choose “Install license only” as described on the wiki. It would have been better to choose the full enterprise option to get all the plugins so I circled back and did that.

Note the license is only valid for two weeks so plan carefully!

Installing plugins

A few plugin names differed between the JDF and what was available:

  • Disk-usage-plugin vs Disk usage plugin
  • Jabber notifier plugin vs jabber plugin
  • Node and Label Parameter Plugin vs Nodelabel parameter plugin
  • Pipeline: Multi-Branch vs Multi-Branch pipeline

I also added the literate plugin which is referenced in objectives, but not in the plugin list in the PDF. Finally, I installed the File System SCM plugin so I didn’t have to put everything I build in local git to test things.

 

There were some plugins I wasn’t sure if I had based on the PDF names:

  • Analytics
  • Client Masters
  • Cluster Operations
  • Shared cloud
  • Shared slaves
  • Pipeline Checkpoints Plugin (formerly known as Pipeline Checkpoints Plugin)

Installing Cloudbees Jenkins Operations Center

I had never used Cloudbees Jenkins Operations Center (CJOC) before. I downloaded the war and set my JENKINS_HOME variable. Then I started the CJOC:

java –jar jenkins-oc.war –httpPort=8081 –prefix=/operations-center

And accessed it at http://localhost:8081/operations-center/registration

Note: I realized 3 days before the test that anyone can get an account to edit the Jenkins wiki and fix typos (fixed one at that point). I wish I had realized this earlier as I saw a few others.

15 vs 30 day trial licenses for Jenkins Enterprise

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On February 24th, I’m taking the beta for the Jenkins Certification. This beta is different than beta exams from Oracle. In particular, it is only being offered on one day. The only choices you have are:

  • whether you want the morning or afternoon offering. It’s also only being offered in 12 cities (8 in the US and 4 in Europe). I chose the afternoon because I’ll probably be up late the night before. (yeah, I know. not ideal for taking an exam)
  • whether you want the Open Source or Enterprise version of the exam. I chose Enterprise because we use it at work and I like some of the features like templates.

This isn’t a great time for me to study for or take an exam. The exam is being held, literally the day after the robot is due for robotics team on which I mentor the programmers. This means I have little spare time. Especially for the week before the exam.  It’s worth a shot though. I know a lot about Jenkins without studying. And studying for the exam has filled in a lot of what I don’t know nicely.

I started studying two weeks ago (when I registered.)  I wanted to use a trial license for the enterprise edition so I could play with those features at home. I checked the evaluation agreement and it said that trial licenses default to 30 days. I checked again today and it says 15 days so either they fixed it or I misread it. It’s possible they fixed it because I did inform them of the discrepancy.

I filled out the trial form which gave me a 15 day license. I used the contact us form on Cloudbees site to ask about the 15 vs 30 days. They don’t allow gmail as an email provider so I used my javaranch address. (I get that they only want to talk to companies but what if someone is running a business our of gmail?)

A two week trial is also a big annoying because you get the green bar that resists being hidden reminding you that license is about to expire. This left me with a problem because I wanted to review some features a few days before the exam. I’d have installed the enterprise trial license if I had know that it was only good for 15 days.

I checked the license again and it doesn’t say that you can’t use two trials back to back. That would solve my problem. You can’t get another trial for the same instance id. You can for the same email.

Note: Check the trial agreement before attempting this to make sure it isn’t banned in the future.

Approach 1 – Clean install

First, I renamed my working directory so Jenkins thinks it is clean install. I’m not attached to any of my configuration or jobs. So a clean install is fine. I did backup my old install in case I wanted to check on my settings:

mv $HOME/.jenkins $HOME/.jenkins-bkp

Then I started Jenkins:

java -jar jenkins.war

This gives a clean install with no plugins. I then followed the instructions to convert to Enterprise including getting a trial license successfully.

I did want the exact same plugins along with build tools, so rather than redoing that all manually, I ran:

cp -r $HOME/.jenkins-bkp/plugins/* $HOME/.jenkins/plugins
cp $HOME/.jenkins-bkp/config.xml $HOME/.jenkins/config.xml

I then hand edited the config.xml to set <useSecurity>false</useSecurity> instead of true.

Approach 2 – Delete the license files

The technique described here to delete a few files also might work.