Blue Ocean Dev Log: January Week #3

Published on 1/20/2017 by Michael Neale

    As we get closer to Blue Ocean 1.0, which is planned for the end of March, I have started highlighting some of the good stuff that has been going on, and this week was a very busy week.

    A new Blue Ocean beta (b18) was released with:

    • Parametrized pipelines are now supported!

    • i18n improvements

    • Better support for matrix and the evil (yet somehow still used) Maven project type (don’t use it!)

    • SSE fixes for IE and Edge browsers

    • An alpha release of the Visual Editor for Jenkinsfiles on top of Declarative Pipeline has snuck into the "experimental" update center. Andrew will be talking about Declarative Pipelines at FOSDEM next week.

    Parametrized Pipelines

    You would know this if you followed Thorsten’s twitter account.

    Starting with parameters from @thorscherler

    That twitter account is mostly pics of Thorsten in running gear, but occasionally he announces new features as they land.

    When you run a pipeline that requires parameters, it will popup a dialog like this no matter where you run it from. Most input types are supported (similar to input), with a planned extension point for custom input types.

    Editor

    Pipeline Editor plugin

    A very-very early version of the Blue Ocean Pipeline Editor plugin that will set your hair on fire of the editor is in the experimental update center.

    Declarative pipelines are still not at version 1.0 status, but will be shortly. This editor allows you to roundtrip Jenkinsfiles written in this way, so they can be edited as text, or visually. The steps available are discovered form the installed plugins. One to watch.

    So, what’s next?

    • Creation of Git Pipelines, and likely GitHub too.

    • Show parallel branches that aren’t in a stage visually

    • Show stderr/out in test reports

    • Show more information when Jenkins is "busy", such as when agents are coming online, in the Pipeline view

    Enjoy!

    If you’re interested in helping to make Blue Ocean a great user experience for Jenkins, please join the Blue Ocean development team on Gitter!

    About the Author
    Michael Neale
    		Michael Neale

    Michael is a CD enthusiast with a interest in User Experience. He is a co-founder of CloudBees and a long time OSS developer, and can often be found lurking around the jenkins-dev mailing list or #jenkins on irc (same nick as twitter name). Before CloudBees he worked at Red Hat.