Developing software while working at university always and invariably put you in a uncomfortable position. On the one side academia is one of the driving forces behind good software development practices. We study, analyze, test, defend and sometimes attack different development methodology and more importantly we teach students what they should do once outside academia. On the other hand, just because our primary job is to do all of the above, sometimes is difficult while developing software ourselves, to follow these best practices. Sometimes is more a matter of mind setting, sometimes is a matter of resources and time.
Today I invested a bit of time to configure and install virtualbox and run a jenkins instance on it. I prefer not to litter my laptop with jenkins as I know I won’t run it all the time and I don’t want to leave around hundreds of MBs of unused dependencies.
Installing virtualbox is pretty easy. It’s in the debian repos, and it’s just one apt-get way. Once installed, you need to create a virtual machine. For this purpose I simply downloaded on the the netinstall CD and I use it in the VB GUI as installation CD. Everything went smoothly and my host was up and running in no time.
By default VB set up a NAT network on the first adapter (eth0). This is nice and easy if you want a machine that does not need to talk to the outside world. On the other hand, if you want to to connect to this machine you need to do a bit more of work. To this end I added a host-only network between the guest VM and the host. The catch is that you first need to create a host adapter on the host machine. Simply go File -> Preferences -> Network and create a new interface. This is the interface that will appear on you host. On the guest side, configure the second adapter (eth1) as host-only network and select the interface that you just created before.
The first time you run the VM, the NAT connection should work straightaway, while the second interface will not. To fix this problem you need to edit the file /etc/network/interfaces and set eth1 to auto-configure using dhcp.
Once this is all done, we need to install jenkins. This is pretty easy as well.
the jenkins wiki gives all the explanations you need :
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Installing+Jenkins+on+Ubuntu
once this is done, on your host got to