Setup Jenkins project from Git repository with Findbugs, Cobertura and Checkstyle

I created a Jenkins setup for my current Java hobby project (a site on physical units intended to make ads money, check it out at http://www.all-about-units.com) yesterday and noticed that my old note on how to setup Jenkins (then it was written for Hudson) is a bit out of date. The Jenkins configuration menues for generating Findbugs static analysis, Cobertura code coverage and Checkstyle format control were completely new. In addition to that, I've migrated to Git since then so there are a few steps also involved in getting Git running as code repository within Jenkins.

Here's a workflow for setting up Jenkins with these features.

Install Jenkins and plugins

First of all, if you haven't installed Jenkins the easiest way is to download the war archive from http://jenkins-ci.org/. This article is based on Jenkins version 1.532.1. You can install in in a server container like Tomcat or Jetty, but the easiest way to get started is to run it from the command line like 

java -jar jenkins.war

I created a small bash script which also changes the port since I have another server using the default 8080 port.

#!/bin/sh

nohup java -jar jenkins.war --httpPort=8081

So now you can access Jenkins via http://localhost:8081 or similar.

Now we must install some plugins which are not part of the core distribution. Go to the settings of Jenkins and find the Plugins section.

Here you should at least find the following plugs and install them

Creating Jenkins job

Create a new Jenkins job. My project handles its dependencies via Maven 3 which suits Jenkins very well. Choose the Maven 2/3 option.

In the next step, choose Git as SCM. If you have your Git repository on the same server as Jenkins you can simply add the file path to the repository. Otherwise you setup the security credentials here as well. Also, choose if you want to build master or some other branch.

We haven't talked about the pom.xml for the project yet, but it will be configured to use some Maven goals. So in the Maven goals section, add goals for test package site.

Under Build settings, check the boxes for Publish Checkstyle analysis results, Publish FindBugs analysis results and Publish duplicate code analysis results.

In the Post-build Actions add a step for Cobertura reporting.

Maven will generate the Cobertura report to the Jenkins workspace under path /target/site/cobertura/coverage.xml so add this in the configuration of the action.

Now you should have a Jenkins job setup ready for building.

Before building we must make sure the pom.xml of the project has the correct plugins and reports configured.

Maven pom.xml configuration

After all the dependency specifications in the pom.xml add something similar to this. In this setup Cobertura is configured in the package phase and that's why we added that Maven goal above. If you hadn't added this in the pom file, you could have added separate Maven goals for Cobertura in Jenkins as well.

<build>

   <finalName>Unitconversion</finalName>

   <plugins>

      <plugin>

         <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>

         <artifactId>findbugs-maven-plugin</artifactId>

         <version>${findbugs.version}</version>

      </plugin>

      <plugin>

         <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>

         <artifactId>cobertura-maven-plugin</artifactId>

         <version>${cobertura.version}</version>

         <configuration>

            <formats>

               <format>xml</format>

            </formats>

         </configuration>

         <executions>

            <execution>

               <phase>package</phase>

               <goals>

                  <goal>cobertura</goal>

               </goals>

            </execution>

         </executions>

      </plugin>

   </plugins>

</build>

<reporting>

   <plugins>

      <plugin>

         <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>

         <artifactId>findbugs-maven-plugin</artifactId>

         <version>${findbugs.version}</version>

      </plugin>

      <plugin>

         <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>

         <artifactId>maven-checkstyle-plugin</artifactId>

         <version>${checkstyle.version}</version>

      </plugin>

      <plugin>

         <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>

         <artifactId>maven-surefire-report-plugin</artifactId>

         <version>${surefire.reportplugin.version}</version>

      </plugin>

      <plugin>

         <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>

         <artifactId>cobertura-maven-plugin</artifactId>

         <version>${cobertura.version}</version>

         <configuration>

            <formats>

               <format>xml</format>

            </formats>

         </configuration>

      </plugin>

   </plugins>

</reporting>

Run the job and everything should work out of the box. Do another build to start getting history graphs like below of the trend of failing tests, checkstyle warnings, issues found by Findbugs and te code coverage statistics from Cobertura.