Before doing this, you may need to understand how Jenkins is organized. If you are already experienced with it, then you may want to skip over to the next section.

There are only two sections that you need to keep an eye out for:

The first one is where you will normally land, and it is what you will be working on most of the time.

In the Jenkins terminology, a job is a specific set of rules and operations that needs to be performed in a specific project. You can have different jobs for the same project, which perform slightly or completely different operations, and these can be triggered sequentially.

A build is the process of executing a job. We will cover this and see what we can achieve with a single build by configuring the various aspects of the job. The build can result in the creation of one or more artefacts, deploy the build result somewhere or trigger some other job or process within Jenkins itself, or outside of it.

You need to fix Jenkins' security immediately after installing it, unless you will be the only person accessing it and the server where it's installed will have no external access, it's probably better to navigate to http://jenkins:8080/configureSecurity/.

You can set up whichever authentication system you want, using PAM, LDAP, or its internal user database. We will be using the latter, but remember that if you're willing to do something a bit stronger or interconnected, there may be additional steps that you may need to follow. Most of the interface forms have a few small info buttons that you can use to display some information, as shown in the following screenshot:

View of the Configure Global Security page with an open info box

The second aspect that requires a little thinking from your side is how Jenkins will be accessing and checking your repository.

Any major online repository provider, such as GitHub and BitBucket will let you create a so-called deployment key, which is used for a read-only access to the repository.

For anything more complex, such as merging and pushing your branches, you would need to set up its own user, as shown in the following screenshot:

The deployment keys setup page in BitBucket, available from the settings of each repository

If you have more repositories that are hosted by different places, then you need to set up as many credentials as needed for Jenkins. This can be accomplished by going to http://jenkins:8080/credential-store/ (or Home | Credentials | Global Credentials). As you can see, there's a lot behind the scenes, so feel free to explore and read the documentation for understanding what's needed. Normally starting with the setup of the global credentials may be enough, but there are cases where a non-global configuration is needed.

In order to do so, we need to create the SSH key pairs for the user jenkins first.

peach ~ $ sudo -s
root peach # su jenkins -
jenkins peach $ cd ~
jenkins ~ $ pwd
/var/lib/jenkins
jenkins ~ $ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/var/lib/jenkins/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /var/lib/jenkins/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /var/lib/jenkins/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
ff:be:b1:ee:c2:69:82:96:00:e4:9d:dd:67:cf:1e:d7 jenkins@mangotree
The key's randomart image is:
+---[RSA 2048]----+
|                 |
|                 |
| . . o. .        |
|+ . *.oo  .      |
|.o o .o+S. E     |
|+ o   .+o        |
|+*. . o.         |
|+. . .           |
|                 |
+-----------------+

Now that you have your SSH key, you need to grab the public key, which is stored at /var/lib/jenkins/.ssh/id_rsa.pub, and then copy it to your repository as a deployment key. You can copy it to the clipboard by using the following command:

root jenkins # xclip -sel clip < /var/lib/jenkins/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

This has been done through the root user because the jenkins user won't have the X display setup in its environment and this is likely to cause the error shown here:

No protocol specified
Error: Can't open display: :0

Now that you have your deployment key set up, you need to go back to Jenkins and then navigate to the credentials store. Once there, set the username as jenkins (which is the system's user name), and set the private key as From the Jenkins master ~/.ssh.

The following sections will cover the installation of additional plugins and the configuration of the job.

Now that you have covered the basic configuration of Jenkins, you need to install the required plugins so that everything works as expected.

This section is normally handled easily by Jenkins. There's a project that is specifically for the PHP projects on Jenkins. You can find it at http://jenkins-php.org. Not only does the project list the following plugins, but it also lists a meta plugin, which is available on Jenkins, and it will download all the required plug-ins.

The preceding list is taken from http://jenkins-php.org/installation.html, and it might change in the future, so keep that in mind.

If you navigate to Manage Jenkins | Manage Plugins, then you can search for the plugin php and select Install without restart. When you are on the installation page, select the Restart Jenkins when installation is complete and no jobs are running option (sometimes the installation page does not refresh itself automatically, so you might have to refresh the page; a list of plugins will get installed even if you navigate away from this page).

Now, you need to install the tools needed by these plugins, so open the composer.json file and then add the following to your require-dev section:

// composer.json
"phploc/phploc": "@stable",
"pdepend/pdepend": "@stable",
"phpmd/phpmd": "@stable",
"sebastian/phpcpd": "@dev",
"yiisoft/yii2-coding-standards": "*",
"theseer/phpdox": "@stable"

Now, run the composer update to install these effectively.