I'm planning on having an elasticsearch 5.1.1 folder in my git project. When Jenkins does a build it'll spin up a local elasticsearch instance, run some integration test that will query ES, shut down and continue with the deployment process. Anyone else doing this? Any tips?
Yes, I do it in all my (plugin) projects. The integration tests are a gradle task. It's easy to run gradle tasks in jenkins.
All my production ETL jobs are also gradle tasks, embedded in a jenkins CI environment.
Instead of a "local Elasticsearch instance" you will be happier with a transport client. You can select to connect to a dev or production cluster by addressing another host/port and you don't have to care about cluster state network traffic or cluster node connection mess.
Not sure what you mean by "the deployment process", sounds like JEE.