Continuous Integration - Using Jenkins and IBM ClearCase

In the company I work for Cruise Control has always been the primary continuous integration tool. When I was asked to add a few projects to Cruise Control I thought it would be a fairly straightforward task.... I was wrong. Cruise Control works by setting up your projects with a series of .xml files and running a batch file that pulls the configurations from these files and starts the continuous polling.

Thankfully, Jenkins(Hudson at the time) was in the pipeline and I was given the responsibility of migrating one of our latest projects to it. Jenkins is a very easy to use tool which hides much of the 'hard' configuration behind a GUI.

Installing Jenkins

To run Jenkins you must first download it from the Jenkins website and save it to a sensible location. The latest version can be found at the Jenkins Website.

One thing to note here is that you will be downloading a .war file NOT a .zip . This caused a great deal of confusion when I downloaded this from a Windows PC and it decided to rename the file to a .zip - furthermore, Winzip will happily open the file as if it was a .zip . If this happens simply change the file extension to .war.

On the host machine you can now start running Jenkins. To get Jenkins running I created a small batch file (Linux script here):

@ECHO off
@rem *************************************************************************
@rem PROPERTIES - Set these here.
@rem
@rem *************************************************************************


SET HTTP_PORT="8080"
SET AJP_PORT="8000"
SET JAVA_HOME=D:\Tools\jdk\jdk160_14_R27.6.5-32


@rem JAVA properties
SET MAX_PERM_SIZE=128m


@rem *************************************************************************
@rem Make sure you have a Java JDK on your machine and that you have it added
@rem to the PATH environment variable
@rem *************************************************************************
SET PATH=%JAVA_HOME%\bin;%PATH%


@rem *************************************************************************
@rem Set the window title. Change project name to suit
@rem *************************************************************************
TITLE Jenkins Continuous Integration

@rem Start Jenkins
java -jar jenkins.war --httpPort=%HTTP_PORT% --ajp13Port=%AJP_PORT% -XX:MaxPermSize=%MAX_PERM_SIZE%