Jenkins Installation on Ubuntu

Jenkins is an open source Continuous Integration server capable of orchestrating a chain of actions that help to achieve the Continuous Integration process (and not only) in an automated fashion.

Jenkins is free and is entirely written in Java. Jenkins is a widely used application around the world that has around 300k installations and growing day by day.

It is a server-based application and requires a web server like Apache Tomcat. The reason Jenkins became so popular is that of its monitoring of repeated tasks which arise during the development of a project. For example, if your team is developing a project, Jenkins will continuously test your project builds and show you the errors in early stages of your development.

By using Jenkins, software companies can accelerate their software development process, as Jenkins can automate build and test at a rapid rate. Jenkins supports the complete development lifecycle of software from building, testing, documenting the software, deploying and other stages of a software development lifecycle.

Prerequisite

• Make sure you are logged in as a user with sudo privileges
• Java 8 or later version up and running
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install default-jdk
• sudo java –version

• Maven is up & running
• Sudo apt-get install maven
• Sudo mvn --version

Installation steps:

• Add repository key to System
•  wget -q -O - https://pkg.jenkins.io/debian/jenkins-ci.org.key | sudo apt-key add -
• Append the Debian package repository address to the server’s sources.list:
•  sudo sh -c 'echo deb http://pkg.jenkins.io/debian-stable binary/ > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jenkins.list'
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install Jenkins
• Start the Jenkins
• sudo service jenkins start

By default, Jenkins will start on port 8080, find the IP address of your ubuntu using ifconfig command and try hitting http://ip:8080 from your browser to view the Jenkins dashboard.

Above screen is asking for Jenkins initial password which can be retrieved from initialAdminPassword file.

sudo cat /var/lib/jenkins/secrets/initialAdminPassword

From the next screen, click on install suggested plugin which will immediately begin the installation process:

Once done with the installation, you will be asked to set up the first administrative user. You can skip this step and continue as admin using the initial password we used above or we can create the Jenkins user.

Update all the fields and click on save and continue button. The next screen will be instance Configuration page that will ask to confirm the preferred URL for your Jenkins instance. Click Save and Finish.

Click Start using Jenkins to visit the main Jenkins dashboard:

Congratulation! your Jenkins is up and running on your Ubuntu instance.

Setting up Lombok with SpringToolSuite and Intellij Idea

Lombok is a java library that you can plug into your editor which will automatically generate code in .class file instead of in source file.
E.g:  getters, setters toString, equals, hashcode, builder, loggers, and many others.

In this tutorial, I’ll talk about configuring it in two of the most popular IDEs- IntelliJ IDEA and Spring Tool Suite.

Check my Github repo to learn project Lombok using java source code.

Note: Step for installing the plugin for Eclipse and Spring tool Suite (STS) are the same.

Steps to configure Lombok in STS

• Download Lombok jar from the Lombok site.
• Double click on Lombok jar which will open below Installer wizard, Choose IDEs in which you want to install. If your not IDE is not listed then you can browse using Specify location tab.

• Once selected, click on Install/update button and you are done.

Steps to configure Lombok in IntelliJ IDEA

• Open IntelliJ Idea and click on File-> Settings…
• Click on Plugin option and then search for Lombok
• Click on the Install button on the plugin page

• Once done with the installation, click on the restart IDE button.

Streaming Spring boot logs to ELK stack

In my previous blog, we have done ELK installation on windows 10 and we have even tried to push messages from input console to Elastic Search and finally viewed on Kibana Server.

I will write a separate blog on why do we need ELK?

In this blog, I’ll show you how can we push spring boot application log directly to Elastic search using Logstash which we can analyze on Kibana and If you don’t know how to install ELK on windows 10 then you can refer my previous blog and start Elastic Search and Kibana server.

Prerequisite

• Elastic Search and Kibana running on your machine
• Basic knowledge of Spring boot application

If you don’t want to start your application from scratch then you can download one spring boot application from my GitHub repository as well.

I am assuming that the Elastic Search and Kibana server are running on your machine and you have a fair idea of how to start the Logstash server and what is Logstash conf file.

So, to push spring boot logs continuously to Elastic Server, We have to open one TCP port in Logstash server and for that we have to create one Logstash config file (say elklogstash.conf) under ${LOGSTASH_HOME}/conf directory mentioning on which port TCP port should be listening under input filter and where to push the data once we received under Output filter.

For simplicity, I am skipping the filter tag as it is optional.

elklogstash.conf

Now start the Logstash server bypassing newly created conf file.

   bin\logstash -f .\config\elklogstash.conf

Cool! Now Logstash server is also up and running and if you observe the log, you will realize that it is also listening on port 4560 as mentioned in the conf file. Configure the newly created index (elkbootlogs) on Kibana as we have done during the ELK setup.

Now let's do some changes to spring boot application so that it can push all the logs to 4056 TCP port.

For this tutorial, I am using spring-logger project from my Github repository.

Add below dependency to the pom.xml file. We need Logstash encoder to encode messages.

<!-- Added for logstash Encoder-->

<dependency>

<groupId>net.logstash.logback</groupId>

<artifactId>logstash-logback-encoder</artifactId>

<version>6.2</version>

</dependency>

Open logback-spring.xml file which is under the resource folder and create new appender (say elk). The task of this appender is to push logs to the destination TCP socket and under this appender, compulsory use LogstashEncoder.

<appender name="elk" class="net.logstash.logback.appender.LogstashTcpSocketAppender">

    <destination>localhost:4560</destination>

    <!-- encoder is required -->

    <encoder class="net.logstash.logback.encoder.LogstashEncoder" />

</appender>

Add new appender to root level

<!-- LOGGING everything at INFO level -->

<root level="info">

<appender-ref ref="RollingFile" />

<appender-ref ref="Console" />

<appender-ref ref="elk" />

</root>

Save all files and start your application. So, we are done with all the setup. Its time to check whether all the changes are done properly or not.

Open Kibana on your browser (http://localhost:5601) and select your index under the Discover tab. You will see all logs are populating on Kibana as well.

Congratulations! Our configuration is working absolutely fine and it is pushing logs to Elastic Search. 

You can download the source code from here, ELK code chnages are under elkstack branch.