Let's try JFrog Enterprise+ CICD

One of the more interesting offerings that was presented at HashiConf 2019 came from the JFrog vendor booth - makers of Artifactory, one of the two leading binary artifact storage and dissemination tools (the other being Sonatype Nexus).  They told me they now have (in beta) CI/CD pipelines.  This I had to try...

Sign-up

First, go to the free-trial page and sign up for the GCP Sandbox demo

After jumping through a few captcha hoops, you’ll finally get presented to your sandbox environment:

Click “Launch Test Drive” and this will create Artifactory, Xray and... Jenkins.

Deflated

Really.. Junkins? That’s their big “CI/CD” innovation? Not even a unique port.. Just the standard 8086…

The PDF clues us in later:

Why?  So it’s Jenkins, but can we learn something?

Try it anyways

To start with, it wants to build https://github.com/jfrogtraining/project-examples.git from branch eplus-orbitera. Let’s try this locally.

Looks like we need to install gradle

Refresh env and try again;

But as many times as i tried to build and publish, no luck.  I tried downgrading to gradle 3.3 as well.

Errors about not having an artifactoryPublish kept pestering me…

C:\Users\isaac\Documents\Workspaces\project-examples\tutorial\step1-create-gradle-app>D:\gradle-3.3\bin\gradle clean artifactoryPublish -b ./build.gradle
Starting a Gradle Daemon (subsequent builds will be faster)

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
Task 'artifactoryPublish' not found in root project 'frogsws'.

* Try:
Run gradle tasks to get a list of available tasks. Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.

BUILD FAILED

Total time: 8.592 secs

I manually added it

C:\Users\isaac\Documents\Workspaces\project-examples\tutorial\step1-create-gradle-app>git diff
diff --git a/tutorial/step1-create-gradle-app/build.gradle b/tutorial/step1-create-gradle-app/build.gradle
index 790c6b1..546a7b8 100644
--- a/tutorial/step1-create-gradle-app/build.gradle
+++ b/tutorial/step1-create-gradle-app/build.gradle
@@ -14,6 +14,7 @@ buildscript {
        dependencies {
                classpath("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:${springBootVersion}")
                classpath("io.spring.gradle:dependency-management-plugin:0.6.0.RELEASE")
+    classpath("org.jfrog.buildinfo:build-info-extractor-gradle:latest.release")
        }
 }

@@ -21,6 +22,7 @@ apply plugin: 'groovy'
 apply plugin: 'eclipse'
 apply plugin: 'idea'
 apply plugin: 'spring-boot'
+apply plugin: "com.jfrog.artifactory"

But still no luck.

Trying with Azure DevOps

Let’s go another route.. Can we use the artifactory instance in AzDO?

Let’s take a basic Maven build

Let’s add the settings from Artifactory:

In a sample maven project we can add

  <distributionManagement>
        <repository>
            <id>temp-artifactory-snap</id>
            <url>http://34.68.160.182/artifactory/libs-snapshot-local</url>
            <releases>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </releases>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>true</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </repository>
        <repository>
            <id>temp-artifactory-rel</id>
            <url>http://34.68.160.182/artifactory/libs-release-local</url>
            <releases>
                <enabled>true</enabled>
            </releases>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </repository>
    </distributionManagement>

And in our build file, add a block to create an inline settings:

#!/bin/bash
set -x
umask 0002

cat > $BUILD_SOURCESDIRECTORY/cicd-settings.xml <<'endmsg'
<settings>
<servers>
<server>
  <id>temp-artifactory-snap</id>
  <username>admin</username>
  <password>xxxxxxxxxxxx</password>
</server>
<server>
  <id>temp-artifactory-rel</id>
  <username>admin</username>
  <password>xxxxxxxxx</password>
</server>
</servers>
</settings>
Endmsg

Then change your mvn invokation to include deploy:

clean install deploy --settings $(Build.SourcesDirectory)/cicd-settings.xml

Once we build, we can see Maven deployed successfully to our repo:

And we can see it reflected in Artifactory in multiple places:

The sample Artifactory they lent us has repositories set up for all sorts of things including docker containers.

Summary:

Artifactory is a very interesting offering and worth digging deeper.  However bundling Jenkins, while convenient, isn't really awe-inspiring.