Chapter 35. OpenShift Pipeline

OpenShift Pipelines give you control over building, deploying, and promoting your applications on OpenShift. Using a combination of the Jenkins Pipeline Build Strategy, Jenkinsfiles, and the OpenShift Domain Specific Language (DSL) (provided by the OpenShift Jenkins Client Plug-in), you can create advanced build, test, deploy, and promote pipelines for any scenario.

The OpenShift Jenkins Client Plug-in must be installed on your Jenkins master so the OpenShift DSL will be available to use within the JenkinsFile for your application. This plug-in is installed and enabled by default when using the OpenShift Jenkins image.

For more information about installing and configuring this plug-in, see Configuring Pipeline Execution.

In order to take advantage of the OpenShift Pipelines within your project, you will must use the Jenkins Pipeline Build Strategy. This strategy defaults to using a jenkinsfile at the root of your source repository, but also provides the following configuration options:

For more detailed information about the Jenkins Pipeline Strategy, see Pipeline Strategy Options.

The jenkinsfile utilizes the standard groovy language syntax to allow fine grained control over the configuration, build, and deployment of your application.

The jenkinsfile can be supplied in one of the following ways:

When using the first option, the jenkinsfile must be included in your applications source code repository at one of the following locations:

The jenkinsfile is executed on the Jenkins slave pod, which must have the OpenShift Client binaries available if you intend to use the OpenShift DSL.

For a full walkthrough of building and deploying an application with Jenkins Pipeline, see Jenkins Pipeline Tutorial.