The Java development team at MS Open Technologies, Inc. has been using the feedback we have received from customers and partners to make some updates to the tools and technologies that we develop. The latest enhancements to the Azure Storage plugin for Jenkins are a direct result of some insightful feedback from a key partner, who is one of the largest users of our Storage Plugin, as well as the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse with Java and our Jenkins Slave Plugin.

About a year ago, MS Open Tech shared the first release of our Azure Storage plugin for Jenkins, which enables Azure’s Blob Storage service to be used as a repository of build artifacts. Last April, we added featured to make deployments even easier, including a build action to download from a Blob and a post-build action to clean a container.

With this latest update, we’ve included a new feature to our storage plugin that provides a way to access Jenkins deployment artifacts in Azure Storage anonymously yet securely after a job is complete.

Both the plugin and related updates are open source, and freely available on GitHub now.

New Post-Build Action: Overview: Anonymously download Items from Azure storage

This new option is added as a check box at the project level that appears after the Azure plugin is installed:

There’s an easily accessible link that is available at the Project level:

And at the Build level:

Anonymous access with Preserved Security

Note that these links are not Azure storage links but Jenkins links. That means that Jenkins still performs authentication on the user that clicks on the link before access to the Azure storage instance that is holding the artifacts. The link looks something like this:

http://<Jenkins Location>/job/<project>/<build>/Azure/processDownloadRequest/<deployment Artifact>

Because this is a Jenkins link and not an Azure storage link, security is still preserved at the Azure level – users cannot access the artifacts in Azure storage directly, and authentication between Jenkins and Azure storage is preserved.

Authentication at the Jenkins and Jenkins Project Configuration Levels

Note that the Allow anonymous access for Azure artifact links generated by Jenkins check box is only available at the project level, so you can decide which project’s artifacts in your Jenkins instance can have anonymous access and which still require users to be authenticated in Jenkins.

Without the Allow anonymous access for Azure artifact links generated by Jenkins check box is selected at the project level, an anonymous user who clicks on an artifact link gets redirected to the Jenkins login screen:

But if the Allow anonymous access for Azure artifact links generated by Jenkins check box is selected, a user that is not authenticated in Jenkins is redirected to the Azure storage instance for download:

Getting Started

Those of you who are new to Jenkins we recommend you reference this Tutorial for detailed guidance about setting up and working with the new Azure plugin.

Experienced Jenkins users can install or update the plugin inside Jenkins by navigating to Manage Jenkins > Manage Plugins, then selecting the Available Plugins tab and choosing the Azure Storage Plugin from the Artifact Uploaders Category. To update, select the Available Updates tab and select the Azure Storage Plugin.

Once the plugin is set up in Jenkins, check out these new features (see the Tutorial for detailed information).

Setting up a Jenkins Continuous Integration Server on Azure

VM Depot, MS Open Tech’s community-driven repository of Linux Virtual Machines, has several preconfigured Linux Virtual Machines with preconfigured instances of Jenkins making it possible to get Jenkins up and running in an Azure Linux VM quickly. For more information on setting up VM Depot Virtual Machines on Azure, follow this link.

It’s also easy to set up a custom instance of Jenkins on a customized Azure Virtual Machine. Here are some great resources to get started.

For source code versioning and repository management, Jenkins on Azure can use the built-in CVS or Subversion instances that are downloaded with Jenkins. You also have the option to connect any code management repository source that a plugin exists for, including Team Foundation Server (via the Jenkins TFS plugin), or the GitHub plugin.

Let us know what you think!

We’re excited to bring this update forward. We welcome suggestions for ways to further improve interoperability between Jenkins and Azure. Please let us know in the comments below or via GitHub.