Setting Up a Jenkins Home Lab

Jenkins is fine, if you commit to maintaining it, but thats a non trivial task.

THe joy and pain of the gitlab runner is that the job is tied directly to the git repo its attached to. This means that unlike jenkins, the setup is versioned, meaning disaster recovery is much more simple (spin up new runner, attach to project. Done.)

You do then sacrifice multi-project pipelines, but even in very large companies, I've only missed that feature once. It also in no way makes up for having to look after 60+ jenkins masters. (dont ask)

Yes, you gitlab gives you less control over environment, but I would put forward that this is only an advantage when running on windows.

This directory (https://github.com/peterwwillis/devops-tools/blob/master/os/...) has basically everything you need to get the manager up and running as a container. (though I think I still need to add Docker to the master container, so you can use the host's Docker daemon to run arbitrary build agent containers on the fly)

From there you can play with the JCasC configuration to do things like add agents, configure the security realm, seed jobs at start-up, etc. Documentation is pretty sparse, but you can at least log in to the web UI and start playing around.

Outside of a single build node, I highly, highly recommend not using Jenkins. It's just such an unnecessarily complicated beast to manage with modern best practices, you might as well just cobble together your own system, or use a real modern distributed build system. It will take you just as long as going through all the endless bullshit options of trying to force Jenkins to do what you want, but you'll actually have something simple and useful in the end that works (if you choose to).

We use Jenkins now and build for PCs, consoles, and mobile. Almost all of our builds must be on Windows. Some builds require GPUs. Builds require things like specific versions of Unity, Unreal, or a console SDK. Many builds result in build artifacts in the multiple gigabytes which we then want to efficiently copy to e.g. a QA person’s console dev kit on our local network.

For all these reasons we’ve setup our own Jenkins deployment onsite at our office on bare metal. But I’m curious if any of the newer services or technologies might be useful for us.

I recently switched to Gitea from GitLab for my homelab. I think Jenkins + Gitea will combine well. I’m looking forward to trying this out. :)