Build and test

This chapter helps you understand how to build, test and preview your app in various built-in environments in Jenkins X

Jenkins X developer environments should be familiar to anyone who has developed in a Git environment, with added features that further automates development processes, builds, and promotion.

The traditional development environment

A common workflow in a Git development involves:

  1. Forking - The developer creates a fork of the project repository into their personal repo.

  2. Branching - The developer creates a branch of their fork, for various reasons:

  • Creating a new feature

  • Fixing a bug

  • Applying a security patch for a vulnerability

  1. Committing - The developer commits the code and pushes it to their branch, creating a diff file.

  2. Creating a pull request - The developer creates a pull request (PR) from their branch back to the main repository

  3. Testing - A developer peer or quality assurance (QA) team member looks at the code and/or builds a test version for validating the feature or fix, finding bugs and suggesting changes if necessary.

  4. Merging - The PR code, if accepted, is merged into the master or main project repo.

Jenkins X and the developer process

Development with Jenkins X is similar to the traditional Git development workflow, with the added benefits of continuous development via automation within a Git context, also known as GitOps.

Jenkins X goes one step further by offering a preview environment that allows developer peers and QA testers to validate new features and fixes using an evaluation build of the functionality within the Git PR.

Promotion is implemented with GitOps by generating a pull request on the Environment’s git repository so that all changes go through git for audit, approval and so that any change is easy to revert.

The CD Pipelines of Jenkins X automate the promotion of version changes through each Environment which is configured with a promotion strategy. By default the Staging environment uses automatic promotion and the Production environment uses manual promotion.

Jenkins X Pipelines

cloud native serverless pipelines

Using ChatOps and PR commands

Using ChatOps and managing pull requests with Jenkins X

Preview Environments

Preview pull requests before changes merge to master

Promotion and Environments

Promote new versions of your application to environments

Developing Using DevPods

Using Jenkins X to continuously deliver value to your customers


Last modified July 13, 2020: release 0.0.1819 (0981d42)