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Jenkins X 3 - February 2021 LTS

February ‘21 LTS release for Jenkins X 3
By James Rawlings |
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This is the first LTS release for Jenkins X 3.x. We are still in the Beta release and the leadup to GA includes ensuring the process for LTS monthly releases is validated and working well. This first releases focuses on:

  • community feedback following the Beta release
  • general helm chart upgrades
  • improved developer UX when editing Tekton pipelines here
  • support for in-repo and shared Tekton pipeline libraries including git URI support, e.g.
uses:jenkins-x/jx3-pipeline-catalog/packs/javascript/.lighthouse/jenkins-x/pullrequest.yaml@v1.2.3`

more documentation and examples can be found here

What’s the difference?

Because Jenkins X uses GitOps we can see the git diff of changes that will be brought in with a cluster upgrade. Here is the Pull Request that has been verified for February LTS release. https://github.com/jenkins-x/jx3-lts-versions/pull/209/files

Anything else to be aware of?

Included in the release is a switch of the NGINX Helm chart from the old Helm stable registry. It was discussed on the community slack that some users on EKS and not using a custom domain had to change the domain in their cluster jx-requirements.yml file.

The change of Chart repository meant the old resources were removed and new ones added, resulting in a new Kubernetes LoadBalancer service was created, resulting in a new external IP address. You may need to update the domain in your jx-requirements.yml. To get the external IP run:

kubectl get service -n nginx

Note the external ip address and update your cluster git repository, jx-requirements.yml:

domain: $EXTERNAL_IP_FROM_ABOVE.nip.io

git commit
git push
jx admin logs

And you should see the new ingress rules created when the boot job finishes:

kubectl get ing -n jx

What’s next?

March LTS release aims to switch the incluster boot jobs to use https://carvel.dev/kapp/ rather than using kubectl to apply and prune Kubernetes resources. kapp is a dependency aware approach to installing Kubernetes resources, this aims to help avoid timing issues when installing resources before certain services like cert-manager are fully up and running.