Indispensable, disposable Jenkins

You rely on Jenkins to manage the full stack of your continuous delivery pipeline, but why shouldnt Jenkins itself be software defined, ephemeral, and available at the push of a button? Mandy Hubbard explains how Care.com uses a customized, script-based startup process and Joyents ContainerPilot with a just few edits to a Docker Compose _env file to launch Jenkins in a Docker container.

Jenkins’s key strengths are automation and repeatability of complex continuous delivery processes, but for the vast majority of users, Jenkins’s configuration is a highly manual and too-often error-prone process. Backups alone are critical, resource-consuming tasks. And if a new Jenkins environment has to be configured from scratch, it can bring a team’s productivity to a grinding halt. But what if there was a way to launch a preconfigured Jenkins system customized to your team’s environment with the push of a button? Mandy Hubbard explains how Care.com uses a customized, script-based startup process and Joyent’s ContainerPilot with a just few edits to a Docker Compose _env file to launch Jenkins in a Docker container. No configuration in the UI is required for Jenkins to start building. Simply run docker-compose up and the environment is ready to go. With this environment: