Before installing Jenkins, you must prepare the server computer on which to install the software to perform output target builds. In enterprise environments, select a computer that has minimal downtime, such as dedicated server computer or a virtual machine (VM) hosted on a rack-mounted or blade server.
Jenkins is supported on many platforms; select the platform that supports running the compiler for your authoring tool.
Note The Flare authoring tool provides a Windows-based madbuild.exe command-line utility to build output targets, so for Flare, you should use a Windows-based installation of Jenkins to build output targets.
To use Jenkins to build and validate output targets, prepare the following:
- A server or VM host computer. Server environments are designed for high availability (allowing the builds to run reliably, at any time of the day or night).
- An administrator account with access to run services and to write to all publish locations. To minimize maintenance, consider configuring this account with a password that doesn't expire.
- An either locally hosted or network-accessible SMTP server for sending build notification emails. The scripts described here use email to notify authors when they commit changes that cause build warnings or errors. In most corporate settings, an SMTP server is already available for use, although you might need to register your server with your IT department to authorize emails sent from the Jenkins host computer. An SMTP service is typically included with many server operating systems; for information about enabling and configuring the SMTP service, see the documentation for your OS.
- Sufficient hard drive space. You'll configure Jenkins to store a locally cloned Git repository for each product and branch that you want to build. Consequently, ensure that the server has sufficient hard drive space to support each of these cloned repositories, while also allowing space for them to grow (due to continuous content changes).
- Jenkins-specific requirements. Your server computer must satisfy the other Windows prerequisites posted for the Jenkins software. Note that this includes an installation of Java.
- An installation of your authoring tool on the Jenkins host computer. Your authoring tool must support command-line generated builds. You must also add the location of the authoring tool's build executable to your PATH environment variable (so that you can run the executable from any location).
- An installation of 7-zip of the Jenkins host computer. Later, you'll define a validation script that uses 7-zip to package up log files and email them to authors when build errors or warnings occur.
After ensuring that your server computer meets the above requirements, you are ready to install and configure the Jenkins software.