5.2. Jenkins Build Jobs

Creating a new build job in Jenkins is simple: just click on the “New Job” menu item on the Jenkins dashboard. Jenkins supports several different types of build jobs, which are presented to you when you choose to create a new job (see Figure 5-1).

Freestyle software project

Freestyle build jobs are general-purpose build jobs, which provides a maximum of flexibility.

Maven project

The “maven2/3 project” is a build job specially adapted to Maven projects. Jenkins understands Maven pom files and project structures, and can use the information gleaned from the pom file to reduce the work you need to do to set up your project.

Monitor an external job

The “Monitor an external job” build job lets you keep an eye on non-interactive processes, such as cron jobs.

Multiconfiguration job

The “multiconfiguration project” (also referred to as a “matrix project”) lets you run the same build job in many different configurations. This powerful feature can be useful for testing an application in many different environments, with different databases, or even on different build machines. We will be looking at how to configure multiconfiguration build jobs later on in the book.