On February 2nd, 2011 the first release of Jenkins, version 1.396, was made available for public consumption. Thus marking a new beginning for many of us who had come to rely on this very versatile piece of software and wanted to see it continue to thrive. Along with some other bug fixes, the 1.396 release of Jenkins included a very important changelog item: Fixed a trademark bug that caused a considerable fiasco by renaming to Jenkins On behalf of the core Jenkins team and the governance board I would like to extend a extremely large Thank You! to all of the plugin developers, bug filers, wiki page editors, book authors and the users who have helped grow Jenkins into the project it is today. Some of the tidbits from our highlight reel: As of this writing there have been 54 releases of Jenkins Jenkins now supports writing plugins in Ruby as well as Java (more languages in the process) We have 7 high-speed mirrors streaming Jenkins packages to users around the world. There are now over 450 different plugins available for Jenkins Over 80 donors participated in our end of year fundraising drive 5 "Long Term Support" releases have been published by the Jenkins community, offering users a slower moving upgrade target (supported even further by CloudBees' Enterprise Jenkins product) Public project governance meetings are held and recorded (almost) every couple of weeks. More than 340 individuals contribute on GitHub to the project in some form or another. About 750 members of the developers mailing list and around 1700 on the users mailing list There are many other impressive sounding numbers I could rattle off, but the list is far too long to be interesting. The project isn’t perfect and nor is the software, but we’re off to a fine start and I hope you’ll join us in making this next year of Jenkins even better than the first.

A slick highlight video from the Jenkins User Conference, 2011 was posted recently which captures some great quotes from a number of the fantastic speakers who participated in the inaugural JUC. I’ve embedded the video below, enjoy!

Over drinks this evening Kohsuke pointed out that he never saw a blog post about PagerDuty. image:https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://agentdero.cachefly.net/continuousblog/images/pagerduty_logo.png If you’ve never worked in a sysadmin role or in any other position that would require an on-call rotation, then you may have never seen PagerDuty. In essence the service provides a great series of integration points with Pingdom or Nagios for handling monitoring. As an infrastructure guy (part time), I can honestly say it’s a great tool and I’m grateful to PagerDuty for supporting Jenkins with our own account to help manage project infrastructure. A couple weekends ago I finished setting up Nagios (read-only username/password: jenkins / jenkins) for critical project services which by itself is a good step forward. Combine that with PagerDuty’s Nagios integration and a solid on-call rotation, and I’m more confident than I’ve ever been that Kohsuke or myself could actually take a vacation! Check them out, and be sure to thank them on Twitter at @PagerDuty for supporting Jenkins!

It’s not often that I get to use that much hyperbole in a Jenkins blog post, but I think in this case it’s allowable. A journey that started over a year ago by Charles Lowell has reached a new level, thanks to lots of help from Kohsuke along with Hiroshi Nakamura and Jørgen Tjernø. As of today, with Jenkins 1.438, you can now download and install Ruby plugins from the update center (the Path Ignore plugin being the first). Words simply can’t express what a monumental achievement this is for the Jenkins project, both from the technical perspective but also in terms of what this means for the future of the project. According to the languages dashboard on GitHub, Ruby is over two times as popular as Java on the site. I do not intend to start a language popularity contest here, but if we pretend just for a minute that the GitHub ecosystem is all that exists. Can you then imagine how powerful it would be to engage and include a community of open source developers that would be two times the size of the current pool of contributors? That’s tremendous potential! Great! Where do I start? For those that are curious, the first officially released Ruby plugin for Jenkins is Jørgen’s pathignore-plugin which can be found in the update center. If you’re looking for a reference project, this is currently the most up-to-date plugin. There is also a wiki page covering Ruby plugin development , which might be a little out-of-date but covers most of the essentials. Additionally you might find the jenkins-prototype-plugin an interesting resource as it is practically a kitchen sink of demo/test Ruby plugin code. Currently only a few extension points (BuildStep, Publisher, BuildWrapper) are mapped in a Ruby-friendly manner. Don’t let that scare you though! If you dig around in the jenkins-plugin-runtime you can see how the existing extension points are mapped from Java into Ruby, because Ruby plugins are running under JRuby, if you need to access some Java APIs, you can do so without too much trouble. The Thank Yous Great efforts like this one don’t just happen without support, which is why I’d like to call out and thank The FrontSide for their wonderful support, helping to cover costs of WebEx for Office Hours and covering Charles' time while he worked with Kohsuke on the internal plumbing needed to make Ruby plugins possible within Jenkins core. If the name "The FrontSide" looks familiar to you, that might be because they also created and donated the Jenkins logo! We should also thank Lookout, Inc ( full disclosure: Lookout is my employer) and CloudBees for affording some employee time for Jørgen and Kohsuke respectively to work on the project.

It is just turning into a video heavy week isn’t it? First the videos from the Munich Meetup were made available, and now the videos from the first ever Jenkins User Conference. The full list of slides and videos can be found on this page , hosted by CloudBees who did a phenomenal job helping to organize and host the conference. I want to thank everybody else involved once again, the fantastic speakers, the enthusiastic attendees and of course the sponsors for making it possible (CloudBees, Red Hat, LifeRay, New Relic, Sauce Labs, Chariot Solutions and eXo).

Better late than never right? Back in June, during his world tour, Andrew Bayer stopped by Munich to participate in a Jenkins Meetup along with Dr. Ullrich Hafner. Andrew gave a talk titled "The State of Jenkins" ( slides) and Ullrich talked about "Static Code Analysis with Jenkins" ( slides) You can view the videos on this page hosted by TNG. Thanks to Stefan Wolf for the heads up!

Recently, Jenkins Interim Governance Board member and core contributor, Andrew Bayer sat down with Tim O’Brien to discuss the Jenkins project. You can watch the video on YouTube or via the embed below.

Apologies for the late notice, I think most of us have been pre-occupied with that fantastic Jenkins User Conference. While there are plenty of folks in town for JavaOne, I wanted to host a meetup/dinner at Cafe Chaat here in San Francisco. If you’re coming from JavaOne directly, use these directions If you’re coming from Oracle OpenWorld, use these directions Kohsuke will be in attendance as will some other Jenkins User Conference speakers, so if you still have left-over questions, I’m sure you can get them answered before the last of the Mango Lassi is finished! Look forward to seeing you there!