Figure 11.8. Launching a slave via Java Web Start
If all goes well, this will open up a small window indicating that your slave agent is now running (see
Figure 11.9, “The Jenkins slave agent in action”).
Figure 11.9. The Jenkins slave agent in action
Browsers are fickle, however, and Java Web Start is not always easy to use. This approach usually works
best with Firefox, although you must have the Java JRE installed beforehand to make Firefox Java-
aware. Using JNLP with Internet Explorer requires some (considerable) fiddling to associate *.jnlp
files with the Java Web Start executable, a file called javaws, which you will find in the Java bin
directory. In fact it is probably easier just to start it from the command line as discussed below.
A more reliable, albeit low-level, approach is to start the slave from the command line. To do this,
simply invoke the javaws executable from a command window as shown here:
C:> javaws http://build.myorg.com/jenkins/computer/windows-slave-1/slave-agent.jnlp