Last blog post

26 July 2024

Cloudsatck Overload

2 July 2024

Deletion of old Jenkins servers

18 December 2023

Jenkins deactivation for new projects

13 December 2023

Reboot of the Jenkins servers

20 November 2023

CI plateform interruption

23 June 2023

Planned shutdown for Apple hypervisors: June 26 6pm till June 27 9pm

5 April 2023

Login failure on CI portal and CloudStack on 2023/04/05: LDAP certificate expired

20 February 2023

Featured template update for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS amd64

8 February 2023

CloudStack is now updated to 4.16

30 January 2023

CloudStack is now updated to 4.16

30 January 2023

VMs will be interrupted on Tuesday afternoon 2023-02-07, 2pm-6pm, for CloudStack maintenance

7 January 2023

Jenkins option `--ajpPort13=-1` removed

19 September 2022

Jenkins storage is back to normal

13 September 2022

Jenkins storage is full

4 April 2022

LDAP certificate renewal

9 March 2022

VMs expiration date extension

8 March 2022

Shared docker runners for gitlab.inria.fr

20 April 2021

Mac OS X VMs keep rebooting

23 March 2021

VM expiration: 1 year, renewable

Brief introduction

Continuous integration is a software development strategy that aims at improving the integration work by applying frequent quality controls. The goal is to improve the global quality of software.

This strategy leverages software testing and good development practices. Before going further, ensure you have the following conditions:

If you think that continuous integration can improve your software but you do not know how to fulfill the previous conditions, contact your local experimentation and development service (SED).

If you want to know more about continuous integration, you are seriously encouraged to read this article.

User responsibility

Because this platform is shared among all the users, you need to read the user charter and to accept it before using the service.

You are responsible for the software licenses required on the slaves (the operating system is also concerned, excepted Microsoft Windows since Inria provides users with the MSDN Academic Allicance program).

You are also responsible for anything running in the slaves of your project. Thus, you are supposed to use adequate protections (e.g. firewall or antivirus) in the slaves to avoid any problem.

How to get started?

If your project fits the requirements presented in the introduction, you can quickly use the continuous integration platform. Only one hour should be sufficent to set up your first project.

Some tutorials can help you to perform the several steps to use the platform:

The Jenkins tutorial covers only the most common use cases. If you want to go deeper with Jenkins, you should read the official documentation.

Finally, it is a good idea to subscribe to the following mailing-lists:

Service offer

Inria proposes a service for continuous integrations based both on a software platform managed by DGDI and on an hardware platform managed by DSI.

Software platform

The continuous integration solution is based on Jenkins. A portal has been developed to manage the software projects. Each project runs its own Jenkins instance, thus the portal is also used to manage the interactions between a project and a Jenkins instance (e.g. the user rights management).

Hardware platform

To perform the continuous integration tasks, each Jenkins instance can access to slaves. Instead of using directly real computers, the platform leverages the virtualization capabilities and uses a cloud middleware to offer flexibility in terms of computing availability and operating system choice. For more information about the platform, see this page.

Provided templates (non exhaustive):

Availability

Because the platform relies on an hardware part and on shared networks equipments, failures may occur. As far as we are not able to offer high availability mechanisms that ensure 24/7 running without downtime, we offer a best effort working service. Furthermore, DSI promises to deal with hardware or network problems as far as possible and a team is able to operate all the working days.

In case of problem, do not hesitate to write a mail to ci-support@inria.fr. Your request will be processed in average in a half working day.