Jenkins is the most commonly used Automation service used in software development. In many cases it’s first installed locally to automate everyday tasks of application building with each source code commit and launching a regression test suite after a successful build. Later as automation matures it’s made generally available or bought as a service from some cloud provider. This being said, Jenkins is the industry standard for defining software automation steps.

Jenkins Pipeline

An automation service is at the core of any DevOps process where every repeated manual step needs to be automated. To make automation robust, each automation step needs also to be version controlled so iterative improvement is possible by everybody involved in the development process.

Jenkins supports the creation of delivery processes using version controlled files to define build, test and deployment steps in a Jenkinsfile. This Groovy syntax file defines how those steps should be implemented within your organisation. For more information on Jenkinsfile, check Jenkins documentation.

Jenkinsfile (Declarative Pipeline)

pipeline {
   agent any

   stages {
       stage(‘Build‘) {
           steps {
               echo ‘Building..‘
           }
       }
       stage(‘Test‘) {
           steps {
               echo ‘Testing..‘
           }
       }
       stage(‘Deploy‘) {
           steps {
               echo ‘Deploying….‘
           }
       }
   }
}

What is Bitbar Build

Bitbar Build is a dedicated private iOS and Android build environment. You define the build environments such that they suit your teams’ needs. Do you need older iOS environments or the latest Xcode Betas as early as they get released.

So what are the differences compared to other cloud-based build solutions? Bitbar Build is running on real network infrastructure, hardware (no virtual machines involved) making build process much faster compared to running builds on virtual machines. Since the entire infrastructure is dedicated to customers, it better fulfills the needs of agile teams to achieve the goal of continuous integration and create a shorter process from inception to production. In terms of security, connections to and from the service are VPN-secured.

As we believe in Open Source tools, we also built our Build service to support the business standard Jenkinsfile.

To get an idea on how creating builds should be done with Bitbar Build, check our online documentation.

Getting Bitbar Builders

Currently the builder service is dedicated service available for our private customers. The best way to get started is to ping our sales, who will help you and answer your questions.

On the technical side of things a first step is sharing your build step from your existing Jenkinsfile with us. This allows us to start preparing your Bitbar build environment. Also the Jenkinsfile will be the base for any future changes to the build procedure that might come up.
Additional things we’ll need to agree, are the number of parallel builders required or do you need some special setups. For example some customers require large additional data files (SDKs, libraries or unit test data) to be available during the builds or in the test step.