Introducing Jenkins integration for Clever Cloud

Today, we are proud to announce the release of our Jenkins add-on with a custom Clever Cloud integration!

Jenkins is an open source automation server which enables developers to build, test, and deploy their software. It facilitates continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), is highly configurable and benefits from a huge community as well as many online resources.

Clever Cloud applications to run your jobs

Customise your Jenkins with to the huge variety of available Jenkins plugins: you can install and update any plugin you need to customise your jobs in the best possible ways. We also provide our own custom plugin to manage the runners that will execute your jobs. It means that tasks won’t be executed on the Jenkins controller instance but in dedicated virtual machines deployed on Clever Cloud infrastructure. This allows you to configure the Docker image to use with all the tools you need, and the size of the virtual machine that would suit your jobs. The minimum size is XS (1 vCPU, 2 GiB RAM) and the maximum is a 3XL (16 vCPU, 32 GiB RAM). If you need bigger runner sizes for your jobs, let us know!

There are no limits in the number of jobs you can run, either in parallel or in total, you can start as many jobs as you need. Each job will only be billed for the time it really took, down to the second.

Enhance your Clever Cloud deployments workflow

Clever Cloud Jenkins add-ons can enhance your deployment workflow on Clever Cloud. For example, if you wish to automatically deploy your project once all tests are successful, you can configure your job to install our CLI clever-tools and then push your code to your Clever Cloud application.

Here is a Jenkinsfile example on how you could achieve this. It uses multiple stages to install clever-tools and start the deployment of your default application. Clever-tools will automatically pick up the secrets in the environment variables defined in CLEVER_TOKEN and CLEVER_SECRET to be authenticated. You will need to create two Jenkins credentials with actual tokens. Tokens can be easily retrieved on your local machine by looking in ~/.config/clever-cloud on Linux and Mac OSX and %APPDATA%/clever-cloud on Windows.

pipeline {
  environment {
    CLEVER_TOKEN = credentials('CLEVER_TOKEN')
    CLEVER_SECRET = credentials('CLEVER_SECRET')
  }

  stage('clever-tools') {
      steps {
        script {
          sh 'npm install -g clever-tools'
       }
     }
  }

  stage('tests') {
    // Your tests steps
  }

  stage('deployment') {
    steps {
      script {
        // Deploy the application
        // A .clever.json file must exists in the repository
        sh 'clever deploy'
      }
    }
  }
}

You can also use Jenkins’s own environment variables to customise your build. You can get a list of those variables by appending /env-vars.html at the end of your add-on’s URL. Using those, you could decide whether to deploy on your staging or production application based on the branch name.

Built with the classic features you love

As with any other products we release, Jenkins add-ons have automatic backups, metrics, logs and encryption at rest. You will also be able to use Clever Cloud Single Sign-On to connect to your Jenkins add-on, meaning that every organization member can access the Jenkins instance under its own account.

You can find more information about how to configure Jenkins in our documentation.

Pricing

You will find below the pricing of both Jenkins and Jenkins Runners. The pricing page is here to help you estimate various configurations.

What’s next?

We plan to provide an even better integration with Jenkins. Our next goals are to add multiple runner retention policies (having successive jobs on the same runner) in addition to improve boot time of runners. We will also open source our Jenkins plugin and upstream it to the Jenkins plugins repository. That way, we will bring the ability to start your own Clever Cloud Jenkins runners from your self-hosted Jenkins instance.