Manage by GitOps

We recommend you use GitOps to manage your installation of Jenkins X, to upgrade it, configure it and add or remove extension Apps so it’s easy to audit who changes what in your installation and to easily revert bad changes.

Currently this only works on AWS and Google cloud as it requires our vault operator (which needs cloud storage & KMS) to store secrets while all other configuration is stored in the development environment git repository.

Using GitOps to manage Jenkins X

If you are creating a cluster or installing on an existing cluster there is a quick and handy way to use GitOps to manage Jenkins X itself - it’s —ng for the next generation of Jenkins X. We’ll make this feature flags options the default when we release 2.x of Jenkins X later this year.

The —ng flag is an alias for these flags: —gitops —vault —no-tiller —tekton. So it also comes with baked in support for Jenkins X Pipelines - the modern cloud native pipeline engine based on Tekton.

Once you have installed Jenkins X using GitOps to manage the dev environment- the install of Jenkins X and it’s additional Apps - you get an extra git repository for Dev, Staging and Production. It also means that if you use an upgrade command like jx upgrade platform or add, upgrade or delete Apps via jx add app then those commands will generate Pull Requests on the dev environment git repository - rather like how promotion works when you release new versions of your microservices.

If things go bad

Generally speaking Jenkins X can upgrade itself quite easily when using tekton. However if an upgrade breaks Jenkins X from implementing CI/CD then the GitOps to revert the change won’t work ;)

if you hit any issues upgrading Jenkins X there is a manual way to apply the contents of the development environment’s git repository

git clone $MY_DEV_GIT_CLONE_URL jenkins-x-dev-env
cd jenkins-x-dev-env/env
jx step env apply

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