It’s been one year since grunt-jenkins was released to npm with the goal of making it easier to check your CI configuration into source control. Since then, grunt-jenkins become my most popular open source project. More importantly, the idea itself has been validated by the jenkins project with the announcement of literate builds.
Tooling
The biggest thing I’ve noticed while working on this is the huge change in JavaScript tooling available to the community. In the latest (0.4.0) release, we now have:
- Travis-CI running a build with tests on every commit and pull request
- David looking at how up-to-date node dependencies are (update 2022-04-14: link removed; website offline)
- Code Climate showing the hotspots of complexity
While there is some irony in having Travis build a Jenkins tool, it’s tough to compete with the easy of use and lack of maintenance Travis provides. All of the above are excellent tools. Travis and Code Climate both have paid options that make a lot of sense to check out for your next project.
Features
Thanks to a pull request by panozzaj, grunt-jenkins now supports authenticated Jenkins instances via either .netrc or username/password.
Logging is also much improved thanks to issue #6 by blakehall, which asked for suggestions on how to debug what the tool is doing. Sometimes you just need an extra set of eyes to see the most obvious features are missing.
I hear this all the time, but now I know first hand it’s really rewarding to get an email about an issue or pull request. Thanks contributors!