Installing a Jenkins instance is pretty simple if you’re a Linux guy. But even if you’re not a Linux admin, this isn’t going to make you sweat too much. First, start by deploying yourself a Linux instance. The OS version in this post is based on CentOS 7 if you are interested in following along.

Once you’re up and running, make sure you can ping into the box and have SSH access. If you’re new to this, you can find instructions on setting up an SSH daemon here. Now that it’s setup we can install Jenkins by running the following commands.


sudo wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/jenkins.repo http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/redhat/jenkins.repo
sudo rpm --import https://jenkins-ci.org/redhat/jenkins-ci.org.key
sudo yum install jenkins


If you want to see all the stuff going on in the background, let my screen capture be your guide.

Once completed the Jenkins install, lets go through some quick configurations that we can use in the future. Go to the DNS name or IPAddress of your new Jenkins node with a port of 8080.

Once there go to the “Manage Jenkins” link. and then click “Configure Global Security”.

On the “Configure Global Security” page click the check mark to “Enable Security” and for our case we’ll use the Jenkins’ own user database but you could connect it to LDAP if you so desire. Also click the “Allow users to sign up” so that new users can be added. For the authorization, leave the “Anyone can do anything” as long as this is your test lab environment.

Now that you’ve configured security, you can click the “sign up” link to add your user information. This will be your login for the Jenkins server from now on.

Once you’ve setup a user, click the “log in” link and login with the credentials used in the previous step.

Next go back to the “Manage Jenkins” page and click the “Manage Plugins.”

Go to the Available tab and search for “Powershell Plugin.” You don’t need this right away but in future posts we’ll use the PowerShell plugin to do some PowerCLI against a vSphere environment. Click the “Download now and Install after restart” link.

When you’ve installed the plugin it might also be a good idea to go to the “Updates” tab and select any out-dated plugins. Update those as well before you get going with future posts just to add new functionality and remove bugs.

Summary

We haven’t done anything useful with Jenkins yet, but you can just feel that we’re about to, right!? The install isn’t so scary either, even if you aren’t a Linux guy. We’ve got ourselves a nice web GUI up and running that we can poke around a bit to get familiar and we’ll be adding a simple job in the next post.