Joe McMahon of White Hat Security talked about “Continuous Integration using Jenkins” tonite.
Joe spent about half the time discussing Perl test harnesses (Test::More, Test::WWW::Selenium, Devel::Cover, etc.) and the other half on Jenkins CI.
Although Perl scripts are run by an interpreter and seldom need to be “built” like a C program, a CI tool can be used to:
- run the test suite, log errors and notify the authors
- test with multiple slaves using different versions of Perl or OSes
- create a distro tarball, AMI, etc.
- be used as a cron server for monitoring, etc.
Joe recommends that developers should be able to do a test run in under 5 minutes. There can be longer tests that analyze code coverage, third-party modules, etc.
Jenkins is easy to get started with:
- fetch a package from Jenkins CI
- run jenkins:
$ nohup java -jar jenkins.war > $LOGFILE 2>&1
- configure it with the web-based admin tool on port 8080.
Thanks again to the Sunnyvale Plug & Play Tech Center for hosting the event.