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Self-signed certificates with Jenkins

Handmade

Article from ADMIN 64/2021

By Chris Binnie

Convince Jenkins as a Docker container to recognize self-signed certificates, verify that the instance is connecting to the correct online service, and that your traffic is transmitted in an encrypted format.

Whether you are new to continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and the world of DevOps or fully familiar with such practices, one name always comes to the fore when discussing the automation of processes: Jenkins [1]. The highly popular automation server is open source, and although capable of fulfilling many types of complex tasks, it is equally accessible to novice users through its straightforward user interface (UI). In this article, I look at how I solved a recent headache on a project in which I was running Jenkins as a Docker container for the demonstration of a vendor-supplied Jenkins plugin.

Although I haven't used Jenkins much in the past, the quandary I faced and, most importantly, resolved could affect novice and advanced users alike. The problem was that once I had figured out how to update Jenkins plugins online, I couldn't connect a plugin to remote software as a service (SaaS) because it was using self-signed security certificates that were not recognized by Jenkins.

The Version

According to my relatively cursory inspection of the provided Docker containers, the first thing to note about Jenkins is that the version you use can be the difference between documentation immediately solving a problem or compounding it further. From the container perspective, I opted to look at two versions in particular: the very latest and greatest weekly release called jenkins/jenkins:latest and the jenkins/jenkins:lts, where lts stands for the long-term support stable version.

The reason the version seems to matter so much is that Jenkins is developed at great speed and is constantly evolving. Admirable and fantastic as that is, every now and again trying to solve an issue on a version that hasn't been written about much online is tricky at best. This situation applies to

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