Jenkins And Ansible: A Get Together

By Sudheer S

October 27, 2022

If you are wondering how to automate the installation and configuration of Jenkins using code, this post is for you.

Jenkins is a popular open source tool to build CI/CD pipelines.

Ansible is a popular open source tool to automate a lot of things in IT, including CI/CD and infrastructure orchestration.

Ansible can be used to deploy applications in the cloud. Ansible is a nice tool to execute steps such as:

Git clone and git pull
Restart application
Run migration commands

When the teams and number of applications grow over time, a web interface with controlled privileges provides a good developer experience. Often, Ansible playbooks are executed as part of a Jenkins job. For this purpose, there is a Jenkins plugin called Ansible.

To install and configure Jenkins, you can of course use Ansible. I wrote one Ansible role to orchestrate Jenkins. There are a few Ansible modules to help configure parts of Jenkins.

community.general.jenkins_plugin module: with this Ansible module, you can install and uninstall plugins.

community.general.jenkins_script module: with this Ansible module, you can execute arbitrary Groovy scripts on your Jenkins instance. Groovy scripts can be used to create users, credentials, etc.

community.general.jenkins_job module: with this Ansible module, you can create a Jenkins job. Particularly useful to create a seed job.

With this combination of Jenkins and Ansible, orchestrate your CI/CD pipeline.