Migrating your CI/CD pipelines from Jenkins to Bitbucket Pipelines

According to RedHat:

A continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline is a series of steps that must be performed in order to deliver a new version of software. CI/CD pipelines are a practice focused on improving software delivery throughout the software development life cycle via automation.

Both Jenkins and Bitbucket have their own implementation of Pipeline features. Jenkins historically used to have Freestyle builds. But, a few years ago, Jenkins embraced Pipeline builds as a more modern, up-to-date paradigm for CI/CD. Suppose you are migrating from a Jenkins Pipeline to a Bitbucket Pipeline. In that case, it is mostly a matter of translating the Jenkinsfile syntax to the bitbucket-pipeline.yml file described in the BitBucket documentation.

Here is an example of a simple Jenkinsfile:

				
					pipeline {
    agent any
 
    stages {
        stage('Build') {
            steps {
                echo 'Building..'
            }
        }
        stage('Test') {
            steps {
                echo 'Testing..'
            }
        }
        stage('Deploy') {
            steps {
                echo 'Deploying....'
            }
        }
    }
}

Here is an example of a simple bitbucket-pipeline.yml:

				
					pipelines:
  branches:
  master:
    - step:
      name: Build
      script:
      - echo 'Building..'
- step:
      name: Test
      script:
      - echo 'Testing...'
- step:
      name: Deploy
      script:
      - echo 'Deploying....'

The examples for each tool above were intentionally kept simple for readability. Below you will find are some key, high-level differences between both tools:

Jenkins Stages are roughly equivalent to Bitbucket Steps.
Jenkins Agents are equivalent to Bitbucket Runners. However, unless you want to use your own infrastructure for builds using Bitbucket Runners, you can reference Docker containers in your builds and avoid needing your agents/runners or your own build infrastructure. Bitbucket pipeline provides documentation on using it with different programming language environments.
Instead of Jenkins Plugins, you can utilize Bitbucket Pipes.
Jenkins provides some guidance on Deployments but mostly resorts to just repurposing Stages. This is an area where Bitbucket truly shines with its more modern concept of native deployment support in the pipeline syntax.

Suppose you are ready to migrate to Bitbucket Pipelines. In that case, you should also reference some of the other key concepts, as shown visually in the diagram below and documented on this page.