Appendix D. Downloading and installing Jenkins
This appendix covers the download and installation of Jenkins, which is required for chapter 12. Downloading and installing Jenkins is simple. If you do run into any trouble, you can probably find some help in the wiki at https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Meet+Jenkins.
You can download Jenkins from http://mirrors.jenkins-ci.org/. For the examples in chapter 12, we used Jenkins 1.424.
The common, OS-independent way to install Jenkins is to use the jenkins.war package. But if you’re not familiar with running your own web server, such as Apache Tomcat or Jetty, you can download the standalone package for your OS.
Tip
The Jenkins team puts out new releases with impressive frequency, which can be disconcerting for teams who like a little more stability in their CI server. The Jenkins team has addressed this concern, and they now offer a Long Term Support (LTS) version of Jenkins.
Next up, you need to follow some simple installation steps.
After downloading either the WAR file or the standalone package for your OS, you need to install Jenkins. Jenkins needs the Java JDK to run, and any version greater than 1.5 is fine (though, by this stage, you likely already have JDK 1.7 installed). We’ll cover the WAR installation first, followed by the standalone package installation.