Introduction

This article details a simple Continuous Integration infrastructure to automatically deploy changes to a publicly accessible website. The source code for the project is available on GitHub.

Solution

The publicly accessible website can be accessed via http://nigerobbins.github.io/ and consists of a single index.html file stored in the https://github.com/nigerobbins/exampleCI repository under the website folder. A Jenkins instance is setup with a job configured to detect changes made to the above GitHub repository. As and when the index.html file is changed the Jenkins job is triggered, checks out the file and deploys to the website. The Jenkins config.xml file can be located in the "jenkins/jobs/deploy web site changes" directory in the https://github.com/nigerobbins/exampleCI repository.

Notes

Although the website consists of a single file, the same principal applies for multiple files and directories. In this example, the source code of the website resides in a GitHub repository and the actual website itself resides in a github.io repository although the website could have been hosted elsewhere. SSH key is used so that passwords are not required.

Enhancements

This version polls the GitHub repository although an improvement would be to use webhooks instead.