Continuous integration server beginner

Question

I'm trying to setup a complete CI server, but I struggle on some points.

Currently, my system work as follow :

• I commit local changes on my local GIT repository, then push to the GIT repository on the CI server

• I then have a jenkins job triggered by the SCM change, who run a clean install and by doing so executes all my Junit and Jstestdriver test (via a local jstd server). This job deploy the snapshot artifact to a repository on my nexus repository

• I installed M2-release-plugin for jenkins, and setup my pom.xml accordingly using maven-release-plugin. When i click on "Perform maven release" in jenkins job page, jenkins run mvn release:prepare release:perform, thus creating a tag in my git repo (say v000001) and deploying a versionned artifact on my nexus repository.

I don't really know if this process is fine, but i guess so...

My problem is that I want to deliver the versionned artifact in my nexus repo (say "artifact-v0000001.war") in my production tomcat. But I can't figure out how to do it.

When I do "mvn release:prepare release:perform tomcat:deploy" it deploys the new SNAPSHOT artifact built ... I don't want to do this, I want to reuse the artifact from the nexus repository.

Is there a way to doing this using a tool (maven/jenkins plugin, or external)?

Basically, I want to fetch the last release artifact on the repository, and send it to the tomcat manager for dereploying the webapp.

Do I need to setup a delivery job separated from the release job?

Answer 1

Your problem is that you are probably using the Jenkins release plugin, not the "m2 release plugin". The problem with the standard plugin is that it performs the regular build, saves the artifacts, then performs the release. It will then try to deploy the wrong artifacts that it created from the regular build.

The m2 release plugin solves this particular problem. There are some tricky workaround for this problem, but that's how it stands at the moment until this feature is implemented: https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-11120 (log in and vote for it!)

Answer 2

Jenkins, especially when combined with a tool like ANT, can do just about anything. It has a lot of plug-ins, and you can always write a script and incorporate it into a Jenkins build. Currently, I use Jenkins to deploy web applications to Windows IIS servers. What you could do here is have a Jenkins build that has your SVN path set in the source control section so that it fetches the latest version when you trigger the build. From there it should be fairly trivial to write an ANT script that copies it over the existing JAR in Tomcat, which will automatically restart it.