This project exists to test some of Jenkins' pipeline features. The release and development branches are representative of what might exist in a real project:

• The release branch represents a stable stage of the project.
• The development branch represents a more bleeding-edge stage that works.
• The feature branch represents the work of someone who has gone home from work and left things broken.

The server_machine branch exists as a convenient way to start up a Jenkins server, and is not part of the testing schema.

Behaviours

We can:

• Check out public Github source, and create builds for each branch using a multibranch pipeline item.
• Run a Python test suite using py.test via a shell command.
• Make and archive an output file.
• Execute scripts at arbitrary points during the build.
• Split builds into test and build jobs, as we do already with simulation packages. If the tests fail, nodes further down the list are not executed.
• Run build jobs in parallel. If one of the builds fails, artefacts from nodes that executed successfully are still uploaded if failFast is false (but the job as a whole is marked as failed).

We cannot (yet):

• Integrate slack notifications.
• Poll SCM at regular intervals. The better option would be to set up a GitHub webhook, but that requires making the Jenkins server public. Doing this would be worth testing.
• Ignore commits with the "[ci-skip]" string in their message.

Notes

Too many builds in quick succession result in "GitHub API rate limit exceeded", meaning Jenkins can't make requests to GitHub for a while.