Learn Jenkins with online courses and programs

Jenkins is an open-source technology that helps software developers automate workflows. The continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) environment can simplify tasks and increase productivity. Learn Jenkins with courses delivered through edX.

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins is an open-source server that automates the time-consuming tasks of building, testing, and deploying software. By helping developers streamline these traditionally tedious processes, Jenkins accelerates the development process, helps reduce error rates, and frees up developers’ time so they can focus on more high-level tasks.

Jenkins automations support continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) processes in DevOps projects. DevOps is an approach to software development that improves communication and collaboration between developers and IT operations. It uses Agile principles and automation to break the silos between the two teams and increase the speed and quality of their work.^{Footnote 1} Here’s a breakdown of what CI and CD involve:

Continuous integration promotes incremental software improvements by allowing developers to integrate changes as often as possible. Automation tools like Jenkins facilitate this process by testing and validating each change before it's integrated into the main branch.^{Footnote 2}
Continuous delivery goes a step beyond continuous integration. In addition to automating building and testing, it also automates the deployment process. The approval for deployment can be done manually or automated. When this final decision is automated, the process is known as continuous deployment.^{Footnote 3}

DevOps teams adapt Jenkins to their projects by building custom pipelines. A pipeline is a set of automations that allow developers to build, test, and deploy code. Jenkins pipelines are made of different plugins that developers can combine to build automated workflows that suit each project’s needs.

Once developers build a pipeline, Jenkins will continuously track, build, and test any changes made to a project and alert developers of any errors. If the changes don’t contain any errors, Jenkins moves them to a staging environment where they remain ready for deployment. In cases where the pipeline is set up for both CI and CD, Jenkins will move changes all the way to the production environment.

Jenkins’s flexibility, stability, and high level of community support have made it one of the leading CI/CD tools.^{Footnote 4} Because of this, Jenkins is a must-have in any back-end or DevOps developer’s tech stack.

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What is covered in a Jenkins tutorial?

Because Jenkins is widely used in DevOps, taking a DevOps course can be a good start for beginners. Being able to understand the principles behind DevOps processes and the technologies that support them will help provide context when learning Jenkins.

A DevOps course may start by introducing learners to foundational aspects like containers, CI/CD, and site reliability engineering (SRE). They may then move into Jenkins basics, such as how to set up Jenkins servers and use plugins to Jenkins pipelines. Courses may also cover other aspects of the deployment process, including working with serverless architecture, setting up Kubernetes, and building Python functions.

edX offers a variety of learning options for those interested in using Jenkins training in a professional setting. For learners who already have DevOps experience, a Jenkins-specific course can provide additional skills to enhance their development workflows.

Jobs that use Jenkins

Jobs that use Jenkins can be found within the DevOps field. As you browse through open roles, you may find many positions that list Jenkins in their qualifications. Some common DevOps jobs that can require Jenkins experience include:

DevOps Engineer
AWS (Amazon Web Services) DevOps engineer
Azure DevOps engineer
Full-stack Java developer
Cloud engineer
CI/CD engineer

For entry-level DevOps positions, employers may seek out candidates with bachelor’s degrees in computer science, engineering, or IT. As an alternative to earning a degree, completing a DevOps course or boot camp can help you acquire many of the skills to become an attractive candidate for a DevOps role.

Experienced DevOps professionals can improve their chances of landing senior roles by obtaining a master’s degree in computer science, cybersecurity, engineering, or related fields.

How to get started with Jenkins

To understand how Jenkins integrates into the larger DevOps cycle, it can help to have a strong background in programming languages and tools. Because of this, professionals in DevOps roles will often have bachelor’s degrees in disciplines like computer science, software engineering, and IT management.^{Footnote 5}

In general, most Jenkins classes will guide learners through the following stages:

How to integrate Jenkins into the DevOps cycle
How to set up a Jenkins automation server
How to choose and install Jenkins plugins
How to build a Jenkins CI/CD pipeline

Aside from obtaining a bachelor’s degree, beginners can build a strong programming foundation by completing coding boot camps where they’ll learn the basics of client and server-side development. Experienced software developers and IT professionals looking to expand their stack can learn Jenkins either through a general DevOps course or a Jenkins-focused course.

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Frequently asked questions

What is Jenkins used for?

Jenkins is an open-source automation tool used for building, testing, and deploying software in DevOps production environments. It automatically tracks, builds, and validates all changes made to a software and moves them to a staging or production environment if they do not contain any errors. Developers adapt Jenkins to different environments by building pipelines, which can be adapted to fulfill continuous integration (CI) tasks or a combination of continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) processes.^{Footnote 6}

Is Jenkins easy to learn?

Jenkins’s ease of use is one of the reasons behind its popularity. Learning Jenkins shouldn’t be difficult, provided you are familiar with basic DevOps concepts.

Is coding required for Jenkins?

Jenkins is a Java-based tool, meaning you’ll need a basic understanding of Java in order to work with it. In addition, learners should be familiar with DevOps concepts such as testing, cloud computing, dockers, CI/CD, and site reliability engineering (SRE) before moving on to Jenkins basics. This will require knowledge of Python and could involve other languages such as JavaScript, Perl, Golang, and PHP.^{Footnote 7}

Is Jenkins a CI or CD pipeline?

Jenkins is often used as a continuous integration (CI) pipeline, but developers can adapt it to support both processes. This can be done using plugins and extensions available through the Jenkins Plugins Index.^{Footnote 8}

What are examples of a Jenkins pipeline?

There are two types of Jenkins pipelines: scripted and declarative. Their differences lie in the syntax that each one uses. Scripted Jenkins pipelines are built using a language called Groovy, which means programmers must know that language in order to write pipeline code. Since Groovy has a steep learning curve, Jenkins created declarative pipelines. These use simplified syntax and do not require programmers to use Groovy. Scripted pipelines offer more flexibility, while declarative ones are easier to set up and use.^{Footnote 9}

What’s the difference between Jenkins and DevOps?

DevOps is a software development practice that uses Agile practices and automation to break the silos between development and IT teams and speed up the development and release cycle.^{Footnote 10} Jenkins is a tool that facilitates CI/CD processes within DevOps projects.