DevOps Foundations: Stay on Target Using Software Builds

Here are the initial instructions and explanation of the lab environment. Read this while your environment is busy creating itself from nothing. Yes, this violates physics; we know. How fun!

To start the lab, you'll learn the basics of the Jenkins interface, a bit about the types of builds, and will create a basic build. This build will be disconnected from any code, but will use some simple console commands to echo out some statements to the console, and demonstrating a successful build.

In this challenge, you'll learn the basics of executing a software build using pipeline builds. Pipeline builds are the backbone of modern Jenkins, and are considered a best practice in nearly all cases, so learning them early is essential. You’ll reproduce the freestyle build in a pipeline script and then take it one step further, by executing the build, and then validating the results using the build log once again.

The first step of pulling code from version control is nearly indispensable, and that will be illustrated here, along with a demonstration of building a simple C# project via a pipeline build. You will create a build that pulls code from Git, and then builds it, as it would be done in a real world build.

To finish the lab, this final challenge will illustrate how real builds are created using code and a pipeline script that are pulled from version control. You will observe the state of the repo on the host machine which will contain code and a pipeline script, and then create a build that interacts properly with the repo.