Jenkins and build process in Docker/linux

[Tron]

Hello

I've seen several places that it is posible to build the project using jenkins, and hook Jenkins to the git repo where our nRF sourcecode resides. 

Unfortunately, I'm not able to find the documentation. Is this just in my imagination, or is this a real possibility?

[Didrik Rokhaug]

Hi,

While I don't have much experience whith these tools myself, I believe that this is what we are doing in our CI.

A quick look in the sdk-nrf repo finds this file: https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-nrf/blob/master/Jenkinsfile

So it is not just something you are imagening. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like we (or Zephyr) have much documentation on how we have set it up.

I'll dig through some internal resources and ask our developers tomorrow to see if I can get something together.

Best regards,

Didrik

[Didrik Rokhaug]

Hi again,

I have now talked with our engineers working on our CI system.

Unfortunately, we do not have any documentation we can share. The system is quite complicated, and wouldn't necessarily be what you want.

They also pointed out that Jenkins is quite complicated in general, and that Github actions or Azure pipelines might be better suited to your needs and easier to set up.

All three (Jenkins, Github actions and Azure) have their own strengths and weaknesses, and we are using a combination of all three.

In general, there are 4 steps needed to set it up:

1. Setup Jenkins (or Github actions or Azure) master

2 Setup Jenkins build slave

3. Setup toolchain

Here we are using upstream Zephyr's SDK (see the version for Ubuntu)

4. Write Jenkins pipeline

Again, sorry for the vague answer. If you have more specific questions, I will try to get you better answers.

[Didrik Rokhaug]

I just remembered: We also have these two guides:

Build NCS application firmware images with Docker

Automate building of hex files for your NCS application using CircleCI or Github Actions

[Markus Tacker (he/him)]

It's been a while since I've written this guide. We keep improving the process and the Bifravst project now builds it's firmware using Docker and GitHub actions: https://github.com/bifravst/firmware/blob/saga/.github/workflows/build-and-release.yaml#L42-L143

We also now run tests on real, however this is still experimental: https://github.com/bifravst/firmware/issues/3