I’ve not been happy with our Jenkins continuous build setup for a while. It was fine back in the day when: we had about 3 projects; we were still using Subversion(!); and we didn’t work on branches. We now have lots of projects, we use git, we follow a git flow based branching strategy, and we use Atlassian Stash to review pull requests before merging. I’ve tweaked the Jenkins config a bit, and we wrote a Stash plugin to prompt builds on commit, but it’s become harder and harder to maintain to the point that we’re not really using it, so deploying is never as easy as it should be, and test failures get where they shouldn’t.

Here are my key requirements; I am sure they aren’t that unusual.

1. Job Templates. We have various types of project (Maven, Gradle, Grails) but for each type, the build process is pretty much the same, with a different repository URL. What I want to do is create a template for a certain type of project, and then create jobs using that template. If I want to change the build process, I just change the template and all the jobs should change.

2. Stash Integration. I want to prevent merging to develop or master if there are failing tests.

3. Branch specific configuration. At the moment we have one job for building develop and feature branches, and a second for releasing from master. I’d like all builds associated with a project to be configured in the same place, with some conditional behaviour based on the branch. Feature branches just get compiled and tested. Develop branch also gets deployed to a SNAPSHOT release (maven), or a staging environment (grails). Master branch gets released.

Bamboo Evaluation

We use Atlassian Jira, Confluence and Stash (all of which I think are brilliant!) so my first thought was to move to Bamboo. I spent yesterday setting up an evaluation and trying out a few builds.

First off, it looks great – nice familiar UI, well laid out etc. However, it wasn’t as quick to get started as I’d hoped. Here’s my initial thoughts:

1. Too complicated! Each plan (which equates to a source code repository) can have multiple sequential Stages, containing multiple Jobs (which can run in parallel), each containing sequential Tasks. This might be great if you have a big and complex build process, but all our projects are pretty straightforward, so we’d always be using just the “Default Stage”, leaving lots of navigation with not much in it.

2. No instant Stash Integration. I sort of expected to be provided with some sort of “Add builds from Stash” function, which would automatically set up build triggers from Stash, and successful build notifications back again. But it seems I have to install a plugin on Stash, and for each repository enable it and paste in the notification URL for the correct plan.

3. No templating or hierarchical configuration. Configuring and maintaining lots of identical jobs for different repositories is going to be just as time consuming as in Jenkins.

4. No conditional Branch configuration. Bamboo offers “Branch Plans” so your plan can run on multiple branches (although I couldn’t seem to get it to pick up branches automatically as described). However, there doesn’t seem to be a way to conditionally run stages (or jobs/tasks) based on the branch. So it looks like I’d still have to have separate jobs for building develop (including deploying to staging) and feature branches (test only).

Back to Jenkins

So, I’m a bit disappointed that Bamboo doesn’t seem to solve the main problems I’m facing with Jenkins. It looks like I might as well spend some time working out how to manage Jenkins a little better (as I’m a lot more familiar with it, and we already have it).

I’ve already solved one of the problems, as I’ve found the Jenkins Stash Notifier plugin. And I’m working on some scripts to use the Jenkins rest api to manage jobs. I’ll post an update if I get to a solution I’m happy with!