This is the second part of my Jahia 6.6 Templates and Modules Deployment Using Jenkins Part 1 posts. This post will detail the implementation of the design proposed in Part 1. For this implementation, Jenkins CI needs some extra configurations to implement the deployment via the SSH protocol using WinSCP and putty.

Servers

The machines used for this implementation are:

 

 1. Developers promote their code to a SVN server.
2. Jenkins is installed on a windows server that has access to the SVN repository. The SVN server is installed on a separate server.
3. The Integration Jahia site is installed on a Linux server with the SSH and SFTP services working.

Jenkins Configuration

We use WinSCP to SFTP the war files to the target server, and Plink is used to remotely execute the Jahia’s deployment script. First, install WinSCP and plink.exe in the Jenkins server. The first time you use plink.exe to connect to the target server, it is necessary that you manually establish this connection using the same user that runs the Jenkins process. Plink needs to validate the host key of the remote server to avoid prompts during the execution of automated jobs.

Other tools that we need to install on the Jenkins server are Maven 2 and Ant 1.8.3. Maven will be used to compile the Jahia project and Ant is going to handle the integration with WinSCP and Plink. The use of Ant is not strictly necessary because that integration can be handled via .bat files, but using Ant scripting gives an advantage because you can use the same script to deploy to multiple servers based on parameters that can be configured on the Jenkins job. For details of how integrate Maven and Ant with Jenkins please visit http://jenkins-ci.org/.

SVN Repository

It is important that your SVN repository has an appropriate structure in order to facilitate Jenkins jobs configuration. The recommended structure is:
a) <SVN Root>/branches
     This folder stores branches of the versioned code.
b) <SVN Root>/tags
     This folder is going to contain the tags taken from the trunk.
c) <SVN Root>/trunk
     It contains Jahia projects and build files.
d) <SVN Root>/trunk/ConfigurationManager/BuildFiles
     This folder is going to contain the Ant build.xml
e) <SVN Root>/trunk/template-project
     This folder contains a sample Jahia template project
f) <SVN Root>/trunk/modules
     This folder contains Jahia module projects.

Maven and Ant Scripts

If you create your Jahia template and modules projects using the Jahia’s Archetype, those projects comes with their own pom.xml file. Jenkins needs to use them to compile the projects via the command mvn install. For the SFTP and the remote call of scripts, we need to create an Ant script and store it in the folder /trunk/ConfigurationManager/BuildFiles/build.xml. Please download the sample script file from here:

Note: All the property values that are in the buid.xml file can be overwritten from the Jenkins job.

Section: Global Parameters

• workspace.dir: This property needs to point to the /workspace folder for the job. Each job created in Jenkins creates a local folder in <Jenkins Installation>/jobs/<job name>/workspace. This property in the script has the value ../../ because the job is going to call to the build file located on /ConfigurationManager/BuildFiles/build.xml.
• sftp.exec.dir: Path of the installation of WinSCP.
• plink.exec.dir: Path of the installation of Plink

Section: SFTP Configuration

• server.sftp: The target SFTP server.
• user.sftp: The SFTP user.
• password.sftp: The SFTP password associated with the above user.
• key.sftp: The SFTP key that is going to be used by WinSCP.
• sftp.command.file: The temporal file name that is going to contain the SFTP commands. The commands of this file are going to be created later.
• sftp.targetlocation: Absolute path folder in the target server where the compiled war files are going to be copied.
• connectionString.sftp: open SFTP statement formed with the above parameters.

Section: PLink Configuration

• jahia.shfile.path: Absolute path to the deployModule.sh file. It is going to be used by plink to deploy the compiled war files.
• jahia.wars.list: Absolute paths of each war file to be deployed into Jahia separated by space. For example:
/opt/Jahia_xCM_v6.6.0.0/deploywars/test-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war /opt/Jahia_xCM_v6.6.0.0/deploywars/templates-test-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war
• jahia.tomcat.path: Absolute path to the root folder of the Jahia application that is running under Tomcat.

Ant Target: Create Commands

This target creates a temporal file using the property sftp.command.file in the folder that contains the build.xml file. This file contains SFTP commands to put or copy the wanted war files into the sftp.target location.

Ant Target: Sftp

This target uses the Ant task <exec> to call the WinSCP.com program with all the SFTP commands created previously.

Ant Target: Deploy


This target uses the Ant task <exec> to call plink.exe. Note that it is using many parameters configured previously to call the deployModule.sh.

Jenkins Job Configuration

For details on how to configure this, check out the available documentation here: http://jenkins-ci.org/
Here are the general considerations:

1. Create your Jenkins job as a Maven 2/3 project.
2. Configure it to check out the code that is on the svn trunk folder.
3. Configure it to build the template project and the modules project via mvn install.
4. Configure it to invoke the Ant build file located in ConfigurationManager\BuildFiles\build.xml with the following properties:

sftp.exec.dir=C:\\Program Files\\WinSCP
server.sftp=target.oshyn.com
user.sftp=root
password.sftp=password
key.sftp=ssh-rsa 2048 55:11:1d:e6:ba:c0:7c:8c:e5:9c:2e:f6:ed:12:11:cf
sftp.targetlocation=/opt/Jahia_xCM_v6.6.0.0/deploywars
jahia.shfile.path=/opt/Jahia_xCM_v6.6.0.0/deployModule.sh
jahia.wars.list=/opt/Jahia_xCM_v6.6.0.0/deploywars/test-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war /opt/Jahia_xCM_v6.6.0.0/deploywars/templates-test-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war
jahia.tomcat.path=/opt/Jahia_xCM_v6.6.0.0/jahia

This implementation is a generic possibility to deploy Jahia Projects. It combines the power of Jenkins with the Jahia tool deployModules. You can adjust the sample script to your needs but notice that almost all the properties are parameterized so if you want to deploy to another server, you just need to register the host key of the target server and change the values of the parameters according to your needs.