How to run and upgrade Jenkins using the official Docker image
Fri, Sep 7, 2018For some time now, I’ve been trying to follow and answer questions arising in the official Git repository for the Docker image of Jenkins.
I have especially been trying to encourage people to move away from using bind mounts [1] and prefer volumes instead.
Running Docker Containers
Ideally, you never restart a container. You just start a new one from the same (or another) image.
Anything you want to keep has to be in the declared volume(s), that is all you need.
How to run Jenkins official Docker image and keep data
|
Tip
|
jenkins/jenkins is the official repository on Docker Hub for the Jenkins Project.
The jenkins and jenkinsci/jenkins images are deprecated.
|
I suspect you’ve come here just to copy and paste commands and move on. We all do :).
So, here you are.
Let’s imagine I want to run Jenkins 2.107.3, here is how you would do it for simple production usage.
docker volume create jenkins-data
docker run --name jenkins-production \
--detach \
-p 50000:50000 \
-p 8080:8080 \
-v jenkins-data:/var/jenkins_home \
jenkins/jenkins:2.107.3
# If run for the first time, just run the following to get the admin
# password once it has finished starting
docker exec jenkins-production bash -c 'cat $JENKINS_HOME/secrets/initialAdminPassword'How to upgrade your instance to a more recent version
Using Docker, upgrading should always just be a matter of using a more recent version of the image.
Jenkins follows this pattern, so if I want to upgrade to latest Jenkins LTS to date, 2.121.3, all I have to do is the following.
You will notice that we do use the exact same command as above, but we’ve just updated the version to the one we want to upgrade to:
docker stop jenkins-production
docker rm jenkins-production # just temporarily docker rename it instead if that makes you worried
docker run --name jenkins-production \
--detach \
-p 50000:50000 \
-p 8080:8080 \
-v jenkins-data:/var/jenkins_home \
jenkins/jenkins:2.121.3Done.
-v starts with a /. Though bind-mounts looks simple hence appealing at first sight, they are not simple at all. You want to get away from it if you wish to avoid getting all sorts of annoying permission issues when you were thinking everything is going fine