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Jenkins Plugin Tutorial for App Distribution

Directus Asset
Martin Mattli
May 7, 2020

In the last blog post I explained the basics of continuous integration, continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD). In this blog post I want to show you how to integrate Updraft into your CI pipeline with the open source continuous integration tool Jenkins. This will help you to improve your app development process. Keep on reading if you want to get information about: 

  • What Jenkins is all about

  • What Jenkins plugins are

  • How you can use Jenkins plugins for app distribution with Updraft

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins is an open source server for the automation of the continuous integration process. Jenkins is used to continuously build, test and deploy your software code, allowing you as a developer to easily make code changes available on a test or a production environment.

As a developer, Jenkins offers you the opportunity to increase your release cycles by using strategies of test driven development and of continuous delivery of your software or code changes. Jenkins does not replace the creation of scripts for the individual CI pipeline steps, but offers you a faster and more stable way to simplify and combine the tools within your pipeline (build, test & deployment).

CI/CD with Jenkins

It is crucial to understand that Jenkins is not a CI pipeline. Just creating a new job or a build step is not defined as a CI pipeline. You have to imagine that within your Jenkins instance you basically just click on a button. What happens once you click the button depends on what steps or jobs you have defined for executing your CI pipeline.

Jenkins provides a controlled way to link application APIs, software libraries and build tools and run them remotely and automatically. The Jenkins server itself has no functionality, but with Jenkins you orchestrate which tools should be integrated and in which sequence they will run within your pipeline.

A CI pipeline is a concept that refers to a group of events or steps that are sequentially executed.

Ci Pipeline.jpg

Within each defined stage of your CI pipeline different steps will be executed. Often such stages are “build”, “test” and “deploy”. Such a stage block helps you to visually represent the CI process within Jenkins. 

A step is the collective term for a number of pipeline steps that are executed within a stage. Often single steps are provided by plugins. These plugins must be implemented within the stage. 

If you would like to read more about what a CI pipeline is you can read our previous blog post about the basic concept of Continuous Integration vs. Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Integration.

What is a Jenkins Plugin?

Jenkins is the leading open source automation server with more than 1600 available plugins to improve the automation of all the different tasks during development. 

The most common uses of Jenkins are typically building, testing, static code analysis and the deployment of builds. But Jenkins offers much more. There are plugins for almost all development IDE, plugins for UI, plugins for source code management and many more.

If you use Jenkins, the installation of plugins is useful, because they extend the functionality of the server massively. Therefore it can be provided for almost all organizational and user requirements.

You can find out more about managing Jenkins plugins here.

How does the Jenkins Plugin for App Distribution work?

First of all, the whole thing is really quite simple. We at Updraft provide you with exactly one plugin for Jenkins. This you can easily add as a step / build step within your CI pipeline in the stage Deploy.

We would like to show you how you can bring your app builds from Jenkins to Updraft App Distribution and provide all your testers with the latest app version.

CI/CD Workflow

Before you get started with implementing our app distribution plugin for jenkins, make sure you have done the following:

  • Accessed your Jenkins build server

  • Created an Updraft app project 

Download and install the app distribution plugin

  1. First of all, you need to have access to the Jenkins Plugin Directory where you can find the Updraft Android and iOS Publisher Plugin for your automatic app distribution.

  2. You can find it right here: https://plugins.jenkins.io/updraft-publisher/. 

  3. Download and install it

Create a new Jenkins build project

  1. You can either create a new build project or use an existing project

  2. Open the Configure menu of that project

  3. After your app file (.ipa or .apk) has been built in the pipeline, add the Updraft Android and iOS Publisher Plugin as a new build step to your deploy stage.

Add Build Step

Get the Updraft Url (CURL command)

  1. Copy the Curl command of your Updraft app project, that can be found on www.getupdraft.com.

  2. Extract the url from the Curl command and enter it to the “Updraft Url” field in the Jenkins plugin.

Where to find the Curl command

Add relative path to your app file 

  1. Enter the relative path to your app file, starting from your applications main directory (e.g. app/build/outputs/apk/staging/release/mybuiltapp.apk). You are able to use asterisks (*) to target your app file (e.g. .../*.apk)

Path to App file

App distribution with Jenkins

In this blog post we have now shown you what Jenkins is and how you can integrate Jenkins into your app distribution CI pipeline with Updraft. With Updraft and the integrated Jenkins plugin, your testers will be able to test on the latest release even faster and you will accelerate your development process. 


You can download the jenkins plugin for Updraft here: https://plugins.jenkins.io/updraft-publisher/.