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Jenkins

Dagger provides a programmable container engine that allows you to replace your Groovy-based Jenkins pipelines with with Dagger Functions written in a regular programming language. This allows you to execute your pipeline the same locally and in Jenkins, with intelligent caching, while keeping all of your existing Jenkins infrastructure.

How it works​

There are many ways to run Dagger on Jenkins. The simplest way to get started is having a Jenkins agent with OCI compatible container runtime.

The general workflow looks like this:

  1. Jenkins receives job trigger as usual.
  2. Jenkins loads Jenkinsfile from repository or from UI configuration.
  3. Jenkins parses the Groovy-based Jenkinsfile and downloads the Dagger CLI.
  4. Jenkins find and executes one (or more) Dagger CLI commands, such as dagger call ....
  5. The Dagger CLI attempts to find an existing Dagger Engine or spins up a new one inside the Jenkins agent.
  6. The Dagger CLI calls the specified Dagger Function and sends telemetry to Dagger Cloud if the DAGGER_CLOUD_TOKEN environment variable is set.
  7. Job completes with success or failure, pipeline logs appear in Jenkins as usual

Prerequisites​

Running the examples shown below requires:

  1. At least one Jenkins agent with the dagger label
  2. A Docker engine that is able to run containers (can be docker:dind)
  3. The docker client installed on your Jenkins agent

Example​

The following code sample demonstrates how to integrate Dagger with Jenkins.

Jenkinsfile
pipeline {
  agent { label 'dagger' }

  // assumes that the Dagger Cloud token
  // is in a Jenkins credential named DAGGER_CLOUD_TOKEN
  environment {
    DAGGER_VERSION = "0.18.16"
    PATH = "/tmp/dagger/bin:$PATH"
    DAGGER_CLOUD_TOKEN =  credentials('DAGGER_CLOUD_TOKEN')
  }

  stages {
    stage("dagger") {
      steps {
        sh '''
          curl -fsSL https://dl.dagger.io/dagger/install.sh | BIN_DIR=/tmp/dagger/bin DAGGER_VERSION=$DAGGER_VERSION sh
          dagger call -m github.com/shykes/hello hello --greeting "bonjour" --name "from jenkins"
        '''
      }
    }
  }
}

Resources​

If you have any questions about additional ways to use Jenkins with Dagger, join our Discord and ask your questions in our Jenkins channel.

  • Introduction to running Dagger Pipelines with Jenkins by Lev Lazinskiy. In this demo, he shows how to integrate Dagger pipelines with Jenkins. He explains the setup process for a Jenkins pipeline using Dagger and covers both a simple and a modular approach to managing CI pipelines effectively.

About Jenkins​

Jenkins is an open-source automation server that enables teams to automate the build, test, and deploy processes of software projects. Jenkins supports many plugins that integrate with various tools, making it a popular choice for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.