Deploy a Jenkins Docker VM in Azure

Azure provides a lot of VM templates which enables you to quickly create and configure a machine matching with your needs.

In this tuto, you are going to setup a VM with a Jenkins services hosted in a Docker container.

Time : 20 minutes

Prerequisites :

• Putty
• Azure subscription

1. Connect to Azure management Portal (https://portal.azure.com)

2. Select Jenkins docker template and click on "Create" button

3. Fill in the configuration form. You can generate a SSH key with PuttyGen or any other tool or you can just type a password.

4. Select the machine type

5. You can configure advanced features if required, else, click OK

6. You're almost done, click ok. It will take a few minutes to Azure to provision the VM

7. Once the VM is created, you can retrieve its public IP. By default, a Jenkins server is configured to be accessed through ports 8080 and 22

Copy the public IP

8. Open a web browser and type the Jenkins url like http://12.123.12.123:8080

9. You should get this page

10. Now we should get the Administrator password. It is not the one you entered when creating the VM. It is another hosted in the VM file system.

11. Open Putty and initiate a connection to this machine

12. You will be prompted for your credentials. Enter the credentials configured when creating the machine.

13. You are now connected !

14. Let's find the admin password now ! Since you are on a Docker VM, you need to get root access to find the file.

15. Run this command and set a root password

sudo passwd root

16. Connect as root

su -

17. Now your prompt should look like that :

18. find / -name 'initialAdminPassword'

19. You should get the path of the initial admin password file

20. Open it with nano

21. You're done ! Go back to the Jenkins page on your Web browser and enter this code.

22. At this step, you should feel like a hacker! Install the suggested plugins

23. At the end of Jenkins config, create the admin user

24. Well done! Your Jenkins is ready!

How to add a Jenkins Build in VSTS?

Visual Studio Team Services now provides a large set of features and third party tools integration that allows developers to "come as they are" and leverage the tools they master.
Some teams already invest in DevOps and release management with third party tools like Jenkins or Maven and want to manage their work items in TFS. It is now possible by configuring an endpoint connection in VSTS.
Prerequisites:

• Jenkins server available and configured
1. Create VSTS with Git Source control

2. The project is created! Then, go to build and create a new build definition

3. Select the Jenkins Build Template

4. Here you can select from which source control this build definition will be connected. Select the Git Source control from your VSTS team project. Select the master branch

5. Now, we've got 2 main steps in the build. The first queue the build on your Jenkins server. The second download the results and save them to the VSTS staging directory

6. Now we need to connect to a Jenkins Endpoint. If no endpoints has been registered yet, click on "Manage"

7. A new tab is going to be opened. In the "New Service Endpoint" Drop down list, select Jenkins

8.Enter the following parameters:

Connection Name: The name of this Endpoint (up to you)
Server URL: Url of your Jenkins Server (For instance http://52.169.74.152:8080/)
Accept untrusted SSL certificates (if Jenkins server connection is encrypted)
Username
Password
Click on Verify Connection and OK

9.Go back to the build setup and refresh the service Enpoint drop down

10. It should now display the newly created Jenkins Endpoint

11. Then, enter a job name. This job will be the one queued in Jenjins by the build definition

12. Optional : You can send parameters to the Jenkins Job is needed

13. Configure the Download artifacts step with the Same Endpoint and Job name.

14. Save everyhing and your build definition is ready !

15. Once your build definition has been saved, you can queue a New Build

Remarks:

• If no code has been uploaded to the source control, the build may fail
Next steps:
Once you configured this build, you can go further by adding SonarQube build steps to your build definition

The file does not contain valid publish settings for Windows Azure

Today, while trying to add a new Azure Cloud Service Project, I got an error when configuring my Azure profile. The message told me that the profile file freshly downloaded from Azure website was invalid and cannot be used in the Azure Project…

I’ve found in the Azure Tools 1.8 release not that the publishingsettings profile schema has been updated in this release and if your Azure website has been created with a previous release, the publishing profile file cannot be used in a 1.8 Azure project…

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ff683673.aspx#BK_October2012

“The format of .publishsettings files have changed with this release. You can't use an earlier version of the Windows Azure Tools to open a .publishsettings file that was created with the 1.8 version. You can use the 1.8 version to open .publishsettings files that were created with earlier versions of the tools. You can determine whether a .publishsettings file uses the new format by opening it in a text editor and looking for the SchemaVersion element. If the file contains the element<SchemaVersion="2.0">, the file is in the 1.8 format. If you try to use an earlier version to open a file that's in the 1.8 format, the file fails to open, and the following error message appears: The file File.publishsettings does not contain valid publish settings for Windows Azure.”

Solution:

- Create a new Azure Website

- Enter the profile parameters manually instead of using the publishing profile file.

Hope this helps !

TFS Azure Preview

I’ve been waiting for a TFS Azure Preview invitation code a few days and it finally came to my mailbox. After playing a couple of hours with, my first impressions are more than good ! The cloud features are almost the same as the on premise version. The web portal is friendly and smooth as the upcoming release of TFS. Using the cloud for that kind of usage could be really valuable (availability, safety, on-demand !).

I have not seen communications regarding the future pricing of this Azure feature yet. But I’m pretty sure that it would interest a lot of developers !

If you want to test the preview, you can register on this site: http://tfspreview.com

You will receive an email from the MSFT team in a week giving you an registration code and 5 other codes for your friends.

Enjoy !