I Still Like Jenkins | Hacker News Reader

I Still Like Jenkins

til.andrew-quinn.me

I miss Jenkins too. A lot more flexible compared to GitHub Actions.

Also addresses the supply chain attack vector we've seeing recently, by design. You don't pull external dependencies on every CI/CD invocation; they're installed once, on the server. Realised this when I was writing my post on what you have to do to replicate this in a makeshift way in GitHub Actions: https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202604/github-actions-sup...

A GUI that lists all the available options is much more user-friendly than a YAML configuration file where you have to guess them or pore over documentation before starting, but even Jenkinsfile syntax looks better than YAML, and Groovy is a real (edit: realer) language that, in theory, can have things like syntax highlighting and auto-completion.

Ugh!

I knew someone would try to say groovy was a real language.

I miss the good old days with bash scripts and cron.

Why must so many diverging environments and tools mingle in our mental space.

You can always just split the difference and call your shell script with

    sh "./whatever.sh"`

if you want in a modern Jenkinsfile. It's really not that big of a deal to avoid Groovy if you truly cannot stand it.

As for cron, that's also supported out of the box.

    triggers {
            cron('0 0 * * *')
        }

At that point Jenkins is mostly acting as a nice frontend to all those cronjobs and shell scripts, but at least it keeps records of all the logs etc.

It's all fun and shells until you start adding parameters especially when those parameters have quotemarks in them. Groovy can get pretty wild with the syntax.

Oh brother don’t think I don’t know how to “work around” anyone else’s favorite tool.

I guess I should be happy it isn’t CA Unicenter.

See it how you wish; but shell script execution was part of Jenkins from day 1, to my knowledge, over 20 years ago now. It's a 'workaround' the same way walking upstairs is a workaround for an escalator, imo.

Oh I know it! I was slighting Groovy when the old fashion way always worked just fine!

Didn’t mean to draw it out as “one of those” battles.

Cheers!

cant read those snippets... need more contrast

apologies, didn't test the layout on light mode - thanks for letting me know

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