What happens during installation

What does install Jenkins X actually do
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The Jenkins X CLI will do the following when installing the Jenkins X platform:

Install client binaries to manage your cluster

Install kubectl

kubectl is the CLI of Kubernetes. It allows you to interact with your Kubernetes cluster via the API server.

Install Helm

Jenkins X will install the helm client - (either helm 2.x or helm 3), if it does not already exist in your command shell path. Helm is used for packaging applications/resources (called charts) on Kubernetes, and is rapidly becoming the default standard for doing so.

Install cloud provider CLI

If you are using a public cloud, there will be an associated CLI for interacting with it. When install is called via the jx create cluster command, the associated binary to your cloud provider will also be installed, if not present on your command shell path.

  • az for AKS cluster (Azure)
  • gcloud for GKE cluster (Google Cloud)
  • kops for AWS cluster (Amazon Web Services)
  • eksctl for AWS EKS cluster
  • oci for OKS cluster (Oracle Cloud)

Last but not least, Jenkins X will install the VM driver when required, typically xhyve for Mac OS X or hyperv for Windows. Other drivers (VirtualBox, VMWare…) must be installed manually.

Create the Kubernetes cluster

The cluster is then created using the cloud provider CLI (for example az aks create command for Azure).

Setup the Jenkins X platform

Create the Jenkins X namespace

Then Jenkins X install will create a namespace for the Jenkins X platform where all the Jenkins X infrastructure components will reside. The default is jx

Install Tiller (optional, only for Helm 2)

Tiller, the server part of Helm, is then deployed on the kube-system namespace. Helm is THE package manager of Kubernetes and is used subsequently to deploy all other components of Jenkins X.

Setup the Ingress controller

In a Kubernetes cluster, services and pods have IPs that are only routable from by the cluster network. In order for traffic to flow into the cluster, an Ingress must be created. An ingress is a collection of rules for routing traffic to your services inside Kubernetes. The ingress rules are configured in an ingress resource held on the Kubernetes API server, and an ingress controller has to be created to fulfil those ingress rules. Jenkins X does all this for you by setting up an ingress controller and associated backend plus ingress rules for the following services (once deployed):

  • chartmuseum
  • docker-registry
  • jenkins
  • monocular
  • nexus

Configure git source repository

Jenkins X requires a git repository provider to be able to create the environment repositories. It defaults to GitHub if you did not provide a git-provider-url parameter. You need to provide a username and a token that would be used to interact with the git, especially Jenkins.

Create Admin secrets

Jenkins X generates an administration password for Monocular/Nexus/Jenkins and save it in secrets. It then retrieves git secrets for the helm install (so they can be used in the pipelines).

Clone the cloud environments repo

The cloud environment repository holds all the specific configuration and encrypted secrets that will be applied to the Jenkins Platform on your Kubernetes cluster. The secrets are encrypted and unencrypted by the Helm package manager.

Install the Jenkins X platform

The Jenkins X Platform holds the Helm charts for installing the components that provide the Jenkins X true CD solution. These include

  • Jenkins a CI/CD pipeline solution
  • Nexus an artifact repository
  • ChartMuseum - a Helm Chart repository
  • Monocular which provides a Web UI for searching and discovering charts deployed into your cluster via Jenkins X.

Last modified June 22, 2020: refactor: remove minikube/minishift references (1116372661)