Installing / maintaining Jenkins on a Linux host machine

[Jason LeMauk]

We are currently provisioning a physical server as our automation server. We are making considerations as far as what our native operating system should be on this physical machine.

 

We are going to use a Linux OS as our operating system. From the Jenkins download page, https://jenkins.io/download/, I can see that Jenkins’ package distribution is available to Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS (which we will not be using), as well as Ubuntu / Debian. I also notice that a Generic Java package (WAR) distribution is available.

 

Am I correct in assuming that if we use a non-Ubuntu / non-Debian operating system, we can still install Jenkins via the WAR distribution without issue?

Are we relegated to using Debian / Ubuntu if we’re going to install Jenkins on a Linux machine (with the possibility of Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS ruled out)?

 

Thanks for any guidance from anybody who may have experience installing / maintaining a Jenkins instance on a Linux machine!

 

-        Jason

[Peter Berghold]

I migrated my Jenkins installation over to Ubuntu from RHEL and haven't looked back.  My drivers may be different than yours and my reason was I am using Jenkins to perform CI on my Puppet environment.  Part of that is running some tests on the Puppet code before it is deployed and this works *much* better on Ubuntu that Red Hat which was getting rather McGiverish given all the hacks I did to get it to work. 

So I guess YMMV depending on what you are trying to accomplish.   If you are doing this in a corporate environment make sure with the powers that be whatever solution you pick meets with your list of acceptable solutions. 

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[Jason LeMauk]

Thank you for sharing your experience!

 

The company is leaning towards not using Ubuntu / Debian, however we can still use it as our native operating system hosting our Jenkins instance if it is best practice / required. I have my own personal Jenkins instance setup on an Ubuntu machine and agree that the Ubuntu approach has been pretty straight forward.

 

Does anybody have any experience installing / maintaining Jenkins on a non-Debian / non-Ubuntu Linux operating system (with Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS ruled out)?

I am trying to discern whether or not we are relegated to a Debian / Ubuntu base operating system to host our Jenkins instance on (keeping in mind that Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS is ruled out). It should probably be noted that we will likely install / upgrade on the Jenkins LTS release schedule.

Thanks again for any advice or guidance!

-        Jason

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-users/CAArvnv22Md4_0YZdgOuAE%2BpZs9Vu3g0BdHJn5qm%2BnemwoAv5sg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Peter Berghold]

My first two installations of Jenkins were on RHEL 6.x (old company standard image) and the issues I used to have there is why I moved to Ubuntu. (future company standard image) 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-users/BY2PR12MB0599FD755ED454A44A65580589AE0%40BY2PR12MB0599.namprd12.prod.outlook.com.

[Jason LeMauk]

We are currently provisioning a physical server as our automation server. We are making considerations as far as what our native operating system should be on this physical machine.

We are going to use a Linux OS as our operating system. From the Jenkins download page, I can see that Jenkins’ package distribution is available to Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS (which we will not be using), as well as Ubuntu / Debian. I also notice that a Generic Java package (WAR) distribution is available.

·        Am I correct in assuming that if we use a non-Ubuntu / non-Debian operating system, we can still install Jenkins via the WAR distribution without issue?

·        If we are not able to install via WAR without issue, are we relegated to using Debian / Ubuntu if we’re going to install Jenkins on a Linux machine (with the possibility of Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS ruled out)?

It should probably be noted that we will likely install / upgrade on the Jenkins LTS release schedule.

Thanks for any guidance from anybody who may have experience installing / maintaining a Jenkins instance on a Linux machine!

Jason

[Slide]

Just as a note, the WAR is not an installable thing. It's similar to a Java JAR file, you "execute" the WAR file to run Jenkins. You can run the WAR on any OS that has Java simply by doing java -jar PATH/TO/jenkins.war. There are some command line options you can provide, but in general you are just running the WAR file.

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[John Mellor]

There are competing update philosophies to consider:

Ubuntu ships the latest (unstable) release of Jenkins all the time, while RedHat/CentOS/etc ships the stable version. I host on a Ubuntu VM, but definitely wish it was better tested. If stability is key, then Ubuntu may not be your best choice.

[jieryn]

RedHat user here.. Or you can just install Jenkins' repository flavor
of your choice without waiting for upstream:

https://pkg.jenkins.io/redhat/
https://pkg.jenkins.io/redhat-stable/

Jenkins really has lead the way and set the bar quite high for open
source projects and making itself available for users of all types and
risk level willingness.

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[Jason LeMauk]

Great! All this information has been extremely helpful.

 

If anybody else has any experience with any other flavors of Linux, please let me know what your experiences are.

 

From: jenkins...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jenkins...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Slide
Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2017 12:52 PM
To: jenkins...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Installing / maintaining Jenkins on a Linux host machine

 

Just as a note, the WAR is not an installable thing. It's similar to a Java JAR file, you "execute" the WAR file to run Jenkins. You can run the WAR on any OS that has Java simply by doing java -jar PATH/TO/jenkins.war. There are some command line options you can provide, but in general you are just running the WAR file.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-users/CAPiUgVc24MHXmheoGGze2xpjHzuzfTOAgiijtc9R75N%2Bc%3DdRuQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Mark Waite]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 10:54 AM John Mellor <John....@esentire.com> wrote:

There are competing update philosophies to consider:

Ubuntu ships the latest (unstable) release of Jenkins all the time, while RedHat/CentOS/etc ships the stable version. I host on a Ubuntu VM, but definitely wish it was better tested. If stability is key, then Ubuntu may not be your best choice.

Personally, I would choose the Jenkins provided operating system specific installer (deb for Ubuntu, deb for Debian, rpm for CentOS, rpm for Red Hat, rpm for OpenSUSE) rather than the operating system vendor's bundled Jenkins (if they choose to bundle it).  The operating system version is either too outdated (as was the case in Debian some years ago), or is based on weekly, when I want the long term support release.

The advice from jieryn (use the Jenkins repository flavor) works for Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, CentOS, OpenSUSE, and likely FreeBSD.  The OpenBSD specific package seems quite far out of date, so there you'd need the war file rather than using the operating system specific installer.

Mark Waite

 

On Tue, 2017-07-11 at 16:44 +0000, Jason LeMauk wrote:

We are currently provisioning a physical server as our automation server. We are making considerations as far as what our native operating system should be on this physical machine.

We are going to use a Linux OS as our operating system. From the Jenkins download page, I can see that Jenkins’ package distribution is available to Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS (which we will not be using), as well as Ubuntu / Debian. I also notice that a Generic Java package (WAR) distribution is available.

·        Am I correct in assuming that if we use a non-Ubuntu / non-Debian operating system, we can still install Jenkins via the WAR distribution without issue?

·        If we are not able to install via WAR without issue, are we relegated to using Debian / Ubuntu if we’re going to install Jenkins on a Linux machine (with the possibility of Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS ruled out)?

It should probably be noted that we will likely install / upgrade on the Jenkins LTS release schedule.

Thanks for any guidance from anybody who may have experience installing / maintaining a Jenkins instance on a Linux machine!

Jason

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[Chanda Unmack]

In my experience, I have been having a miserable time with Jenkins on RHEL, where I have to either restart it or reboot the machine at least once a day. We had to move off of Ubuntu in order for our IT to support us, but are seriously considering moving back.

I have run Jenkins on Ubuntu at several companies previously with no major issues, but I generally stick to the LTS version.

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[Artur Szostak]

We use Jenkins RPMs on Fedora and Scientific Linux (similar to CentOS) here. The experience has been fine.

However, at some point I decided to grab the https://github.com/jenkinsci/packaging.git RPM creation project and customise the Jenkins RPM for our site. e.g. increase the memory allocation for the Java process and change the JENKINS_HOME, since we run a rather big Jenkins instance. This has also made my life easier when dealing with IT, who have little understanding of the configuration adjustments needed specifically for our Jenkins instance.
________________________________________
From: jenkins...@googlegroups.com <jenkins...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Jason LeMauk <jason....@csquaredsystems.com>
Sent: 11 July 2017 16:37:18
To: jenkins...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: Installing / maintaining Jenkins on a Linux host machine

Thank you for sharing your experience!

The company is leaning towards not using Ubuntu / Debian, however we can still use it as our native operating system hosting our Jenkins instance if it is best practice / required. I have my own personal Jenkins instance setup on an Ubuntu machine and agree that the Ubuntu approach has been pretty straight forward.

Does anybody have any experience installing / maintaining Jenkins on a non-Debian / non-Ubuntu Linux operating system (with Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS ruled out)?
I am trying to discern whether or not we are relegated to a Debian / Ubuntu base operating system to host our Jenkins instance on (keeping in mind that Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS is ruled out). It should probably be noted that we will likely install / upgrade on the Jenkins LTS release schedule.
Thanks again for any advice or guidance!

- Jason

From: jenkins...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jenkins...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Peter Berghold
Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2017 10:28 AM
To: jenkins...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Installing / maintaining Jenkins on a Linux host machine

I migrated my Jenkins installation over to Ubuntu from RHEL and haven't looked back. My drivers may be different than yours and my reason was I am using Jenkins to perform CI on my Puppet environment. Part of that is running some tests on the Puppet code before it is deployed and this works *much* better on Ubuntu that Red Hat which was getting rather McGiverish given all the hacks I did to get it to work.

So I guess YMMV depending on what you are trying to accomplish. If you are doing this in a corporate environment make sure with the powers that be whatever solution you pick meets with your list of acceptable solutions.

On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 10:18 AM Jason LeMauk <jason....@csquaredsystems.com<mailto:jason....@csquaredsystems.com>> wrote:
We are currently provisioning a physical server as our automation server. We are making considerations as far as what our native operating system should be on this physical machine.

We are going to use a Linux OS as our operating system. From the Jenkins download page, https://jenkins.io/download/, I can see that Jenkins’ package distribution is available to Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS (which we will not be using), as well as Ubuntu / Debian. I also notice that a Generic Java package (WAR) distribution is available.

Am I correct in assuming that if we use a non-Ubuntu / non-Debian operating system, we can still install Jenkins via the WAR distribution without issue?
Are we relegated to using Debian / Ubuntu if we’re going to install Jenkins on a Linux machine (with the possibility of Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS ruled out)?

Thanks for any guidance from anybody who may have experience installing / maintaining a Jenkins instance on a Linux machine!


- Jason
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