Jenkins is a potential CI/CD solution for my company. I’ll admit that I have it in for Azure DevOps. No one really understands it well. The person who set it up has left the company. Jenkins is likely the leader in this space.
As part of this effort, I wanted to explore GitHub Webhooks as automatic triggers for builds in Jenkins.
There are many excellent resources online for helping with setting up that Integration. Here is one. Many resources appropriately assume connectivity between a Git repo and Jenkins. That connectivity is not necessarily a given so I thought to share some issues I ran into with connectivity between my personal public GitHub repo and Jenkins box on AWS.
Using a public repo does simplify the GitHub side of the equation. In my case for the AWS side, the Jenkins server has an elastic IP that is protected by a Security Group. Only traffic originating from specific IPs is allowed, so one needs to find a way to accept only those packets that belong! The rub here is that we want to allow the traffic coming from GitHub, which was denied by design.
GitHub actually makes this fairly easy by publishing their IPs here. It simply became a matter of setting up (in my case) a dedicated Security Group to stipulate the IPs. GitHub also makes it fairly easy in the UI to test delivery and redelivery of Webhooks on the Webhooks page.
As you can see from the image above, one simply needs to click on the redelivery button to understand whether connectivity was achieved. In my case, I kept increasing restrictions in the Security Group and re-testing delivery noting the successful connection.
Sidenote – Binding GitHub and Jenkins
One interesting configuration item of note is that GitHub Webhooks point to a Jenkins server followed by /github-webhook/. They do not point directly to the URL of the Jenkins Project that will do the build. Note the Payload URL below.
In Jenkins, you do stipulate the repo to which the Project will be bound as shown below. (Those two are shown below. )There is additional configuration needed in Jenkins, but that’s beyond the scope of this article and may be found here.
Photo by Edson Rosas on Unsplash
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