Monthly Archives: May 2019

Upgrading Ingress Rules And Adding TLS Certificates With Jenkins X

Without TLS certificates the applications we install are accessible through a plain HTTP protocol. As I’m sure you’re aware, that is not acceptable. All public-facing applications should be available through HTTPS only, and that means that we need TLS certificates. We could generate them ourselves for each of the applications, but that would be too much work. Instead, we’ll try to figure out how to create and manage the certificates automatically. Fortunately, Jenkins X already solved that and quite a few other Ingress-related challenges. We just need to learn how to tell jx what exactly we need.

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The Evolution Of Jenkins Jobs And How We Got To The YAML-Based jenkins-x.yml Format

When Jenkins appeared, its pipelines were called FreeStyle jobs. There was no way to describe them in code, and they were not kept in version control. We were creating and maintaining those jobs through Jenkins UI by filling input fields, marking checkboxes, and selecting values from drop-down lists. The results were impossible-to-read XML files stored in the Jenkins home directory. Nevertheless, that approach was so great (compared to what existed at the time) that Jenkins become widely adopted overnight. But, that was many years ago and what was great over a decade ago is not necessarily as good today. As a matter of fact, FreeStyle jobs are the antithesis of the types of jobs we should be writing today. Tools that create code through drag-and-drop methods are extinct. Not having code in version control is a cardinal sin. Not being able to use our favorite IDE or code editor is unacceptable. Hence, the Jenkins community created Jenkins pipelines.
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