Discussion on: What is your favorite CI/CD tool and why?

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Replies for: I've had a love/hate thing going with Jenkins for about a decade now. It's fantastically powerful but an absolute bear to use.

Pavan Belagatti • Apr 24 '18 • Edited

Same here, I have a love/hate relationship with Jenkins.

I like Jenkins because,

So many plugins
versatility
Super nice integration with Github or Bitbucket
The pipeline as code is wonderful
The declarative pipeline is good

I hate Jenkins because,

Harder time understanding the point and click nature of Jenkins
Many of them think 'it's not a modern CI' tool.
can't write logic for your pipeline because the tool your using had its own logic
Documentation is not at all good
Its configuration(the server) cannot be defined as code which is a pain to manage plugins, credentials, etc
Declarative is amazing, but the lack of documentation makes you insane because you only find info for scripted pipelines
There's an annoying bug that doesn't let you save the project configuration in a github organization.
UI looks awful *The API is horrendously, staggeringly bad
There's no good way to handle multi-branch projects

I prefer CircleCI, Codeship or Shippable.

Dian Fay • Apr 24 '18

I was actually pretty happy with multibranch pipelines at my last job! The only problem is the same problem with pipelines in general -- poorly documented Groovy APIs and script approvals.

Evan Oman • Apr 25 '18

poorly documented Groovy APIs

So true! I was just trying to do something very simple and I couldn't find any info on how to interact with plugins (eventually figured it out by modifying an example).

Dian Fay • Apr 25 '18

It's really amazing that in 2018 the way you get your coverage report in Pipelines is still

step([
  $class: 'CoberturaPublisher',
  autoUpdateHealth: false,
  autoUpdateStability: false,
  coberturaReportFile: '**/cobertura-coverage.xml',
  failUnhealthy: false,
  failUnstable: false,
  maxNumberOfBuilds: 0,
  onlyStable: false,
  sourceEncoding: 'ASCII',
  zoomCoverageChart: false
])

because there isn't a proper step defined.