Recent Blog Posts

This is a guest post by Liam Newman, Technical Evangelist at CloudBees. Blue Ocean is a new user experience for Jenkins, and version 1.0 is now live! Blue Ocean makes Jenkins, and continuous delivery, approachable to all team members. In my previous post, I explained how to install Blue Ocean on your local Jenkins instance and switch to using Blue Ocean. As promised, here’s a screencast that picks up where that post left off. Starting from a clean Jenkins install, the video below will guide you through creating and running your first Pipeline in Blue Ocean with the Visual Pipeline Editor. Please Enjoy! In my next video, I’ll go over the Blue Ocean Pipeline Activity View.

Back in May 2016 we announced our intent to rethink the Jenkins User experience with the Blue Ocean project and today the Jenkins project are pleased to announce the general availability of Blue Ocean 1.0. Blue Ocean is an entirely new, modern and fun way for developers to use Jenkins that has been built from the ground up to help teams of any size approach Continuous Delivery. Easily installed as a plugin for Jenkins and integrated with Jenkins Pipeline, it is available from today for production use. Since the start of the beta at Jenkins World 2016 in September there are now over 7400+ installations making use of Blue Ocean. This wouldn’t be possible without the support of the entire Jenkins developer and user community - so thank you for your support! Blue Ocean is available today from the update center and also as a Docker image - why not give it a try? Visual Pipeline Editing - Team members of any skill level can create continuous delivery pipelines from start to finish, with just several clicks, using the intuitive, visual pipeline editor. Any pipeline created with the visual editor can also be edited in your favorite text editor bringing all the benefits of Pipeline as Code. Pipeline Visualization - Developers can visually represent pipelines in a way that anyone on the team can understand - even your boss’s boss - improving clarity into the continuous delivery process for the whole organization. The visualization helps you focus on what the pipeline does, not how it does it. Pinpoint Troubleshooting - Blue Ocean enables developers to locate automation problems instantly, without endlessly scanning through logs or navigating through many screens, so you can get back to building the next big thing. GitHub and Git Integration - Pipelines are created for all feature branches and pull requests, with their status reported back to GitHub. The whole team has visibility into whether changes need work or are good to go. Personalization – Every team member can make Jenkins their own by customizing the dashboard so that they only see those pipelines that matter to them. Favoriting any pipeline or branch in Blue Ocean will show a favourite card on the dashboard so you can see its status at a glance. Just one more thing – I’d like to pay special thanks to: The Core team – to Keith Zantow, Thorsten Scherler, Tom Fennelly, Ivan Meredith, Josh McDonald, Vivek Pandey, Brody Maclean and Cliff Meyers. Each of and everyone of you have brought your own passion, expertise and flair to the project – and it shows. It’s been crazy fun and I hope working on Blue Ocean is something you look back on fondly. Jenkins Developers past and present – we recognise that we are standing on the shoulders of giants and none of this wouldn’t be possible without your hard work and dedication to free & open source software and Jenkins. Here’s to the next 10 years 🍻 ! CloudBees – in particular, Sacha Labourey (CEO), Harpreet Singh (VP of Product) and Spike Washburn (VP of Engineering) whose dedication to Jenkins, Open Source and continued faith in the vision and team made all of this possible, and of course Bob Bickel (Advisor) who dared us to dream big. Michael Neale – who drank all the kool-aide and is just as obsessed with and dedicated to Blue Ocean as I am. This project would never have shipped without his hand steady at the tiller. I couldn’t ask for a better friend and partner-in-crime. Tyler Croy – for guiding the project and myself on how to do open source The Right Way™. Tyler works tirelessly behind the scenes to to make Jenkins awesome and it wouldn’t be possible to keep this show running without his help and sage-like advice. Kohsuke Kawaguchi – For creating Jenkins, getting Blue Ocean off of the ground, his tour of Tokyo and above all, his trust. Jenkins Users – your enthusiasm for better development tools which kept our spirits and momentum up when the days grew long and things looked tough. We couldn’t ask for a better, more appreciative or passionate group of people. Hopefully we’ve done our job and you can get back to building your next big thing! Next stop, some well needed rest & recovery then back to to making Jenkins one of the experiences for software developers worldwide! If you’re interested in joining us to make Blue Ocean a great user experience for Jenkins, please join the Blue Ocean development team on Gitter!

This is a guest post by Liam Newman, Technical Evangelist at CloudBees. Welcome to Blue Ocean 1.0! In case you’ve been heads down on other projects for the past 10 months, Blue Ocean is a new user experience for Jenkins, and version 1.0 was released today! Blue Ocean makes Jenkins, and continuous delivery, approachable to all team members. I’ve been working with it for the past several months, and I can tell you it is amazing. I wish all the interactions with Jenkins were as easy as this: 10 minutes to Blue Ocean Blue Ocean is simple to install and will work on basically any Jenkins 2 instance (version 2.7 or later). Even better, it runs side-by-side with the existing Jenkins web UI - you can switch back and forth between them whenever you like. There’s really no risk. If you have a Jenkins instance and a good network connection, in 10 minutes you could be using Blue Ocean. Login to your Jenkins server Click Manage Jenkins in the sidebar then Manage Plugins Choose the Available tab and use the search bar to find Blue Ocean Click the checkbox in the Install column Click either Install without restart or Download now and install after restart After you install Blue Ocean, you can start using it by clicking on Open Blue Ocean in the navigation bar of the Jenkins web UI, or you can navigate directly to Blue Ocean by adding /blue to your Jenkins URL, for example https://ci.jenkins.io/blue . If you have to go back to the "classic" Jenkins UI, there’s an "exit" icon located at the top of every page in Blue Ocean. Dive in! That’s it! You now have a working Blue Ocean installation. Take a look around at your Pipelines and activity, or try creating a new Pipeline. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how intuitive and helpful Blue Ocean can be. Blue Ocean is so cool, I never want to leave it. Over the next few days, I’ll be publishing a series of videos, showing some common Jenkins use cases and how Blue Ocean makes them clearer and easier than ever before. Stay Tuned!

We’re counting down the weeks until Blue Ocean 1.0, and we’re getting close! In this past week, the first release candidate has gone out to the Update Center, along with a new Pipeline Editor plugin. The Blue Ocean Pipeline Editor is its own plugin which integrates into Blue Ocean, so this was a coordinated release with Blue Ocean 1.0 rc1. Noteworthy this week: RC1 includes the Blue Ocean Pipeline Editor, which is integrates support for branch editing and saving the Pipeline back to GitHub (also referred to as "round-tripping"). Many dependencies have been upgraded Per-stage raw logs can be downloaded, this will be included in the next release. Editor design improvements Fixes for overflowing text The new sleeker favorite card design has been released, so you can fit more favorites on your screen! The Blue Ocean Pipeline Editor is better integrated into a few different screens in Blue Ocean. For example, you can open the editor from the results screen (top right): Or open the editor from branch listings: Up next: More bug-bashing! Please join us in testing the release candidate. Instructions for trying Blue Ocean can be found on our project page. Another release candidate 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!

We’re counting down the weeks until Blue Ocean 1.0. This week was one of continuing consolidation and polish. We also released b25 (beta #25), a collectors edition. The next version we will likely release will be a release candidate (RC). The b25 release however contained a number of fixes and features, such as branch filtering. Some other updates of note from this past week: Updated a bunch of dependencies around Pipeline and fixed a whole lot of long standing bugs. Some work went on to make acceptance tests run on varied browsers via Sauce Labs thanks to @halkeye! The Blue Ocean Pipeline Editor had its Save to SCM/GitHub functionality merged to master branch. It won’t be released to the Update Center until the next Blue Ocean release, there are a few more things to iron out. As the Blue Ocean Pipeline Editor is now considered to be part of Blue Ocean now, more people are kicking the tires, and starting to contribute fixes to improve it! The swishy "Blue Ocean" logo is gone, Jenkins branding is back (mixed feelings!) Fixes for concurrent users of input Fixes for handling errors around favoriting of Pipelines and more. Speeding up creation of Multibranch Pipelines via the new "Creation" flow. And of course, a nice pretty screenshot of editing and saving a Multibranch Pipeline with the Blue Ocean Pipeline Editor: Up next for the Blue Ocean project: More consolidation and polish. A first release candidate out the door (!) New, sleeker, favorite card design, possibly a table design too. Also note that there are changelogs maintained and visible on the Blue Ocean plugin page. 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!

We’re counting down the weeks until Blue Ocean 1.0. This week was relatively quiet with a few people away for a few days, and mostly about consolidation. There was a beta late last week, so this week we thought we would let people have a rest from the upgrade treadmill for once. One notable feature that has recently landed is "escaping to Classic" When you see the exit symbol (door with arrow) it will take you to an equivalent page in classic Jenkins (if one exists). You will notice this in a few places in the app now. Some other things that made it to master branch which have not yet been released in a beta: An API to save/branch to GitHub was finished, and tested with "round tripping" with the Editor in some form New compact form of duration reporting (old style was too verbose for most screens) Fixed a bug with input submissions with concurrent browser sessions which was quite a tricky bug to chase down! Only show Admin link when appropriate. Many many bug fixes and polishing. There has also been an uptick in activity on the Gitter channel with an increased number of questions about usage and Pipelines. But also questions from people starting to extend, or add features, to Blue Ocean, which is very nice to see. Gavin Mogan has been looking at integrating the Sauce OnDemand plugin into Blue Ocean for better browser-test reporting. Tangentially related, we also are planning to improve browser-testing in Blue Ocean as well. What is perhaps more exciting is that more people, like Paul Dragoonis and other folks, are starting to contribute some fixes which have been lingering around for a while. Up Next: Round trip Blue Ocean Pipeline Editor changes with load/save Bundling the Blue Ocean Pipeline Editor with the "aggregator" Blue Ocean plugin. Some release candidates! 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!

We’re counting down the weeks until Blue Ocean 1.0. In all the excitement I forgot to post a dev log last week, so I will make up for it this week. In the last 10 days, 2 betas went out: b22 and b23, and a preview release of the editor. We expect the next release will be named a release candidate (we know there is still more to go in, but want to signal that things are getting into the final stages!). The Gitter chat room is getting busier, so join in! Also last week, the Blue Ocean Pipeline Editor was presented at the Jenkins Online Meetup, embedded below. Feature Highlights You can now create Pipelines from GitHub in Blue Ocean. Either one Pipeline at a time, or let it discover all your Pipelines for a GitHub Organization. When you press the "Create" button, it will open the new creation flow by default now; the feature was previously hidden behind a feature switch. You can filter the activity screen by branch! That way you can see a history of Pipeline runs for just one branch. If you like long names for stages - it now won’t pollute the screen when space is at a premium (truncated names on screen). Blue Ocean events ( SSE) should now work on Microsoft Edge again You can see durations when you hover the mouse over indicators Up next: A release candidate is expected soon Integration work with the Editor to save to branches Some updates to the design around tables Bundling of the Editor with Blue Ocean Don’t forget, there is also a Blue Ocean Docker image published weekly with usually the latest released version. If you have Docker installed, this can be as simple as: docker run -p 8080:8080 jenkinsci/blueocean* Then browse to localhost:8080/blue - possibly the quickest way to try things. 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!

Back in September 2016 we announced the availability of the Blue Ocean beta and the forthcoming Visual Pipeline Editor. We are happy to announce that you can try the Pipeline Editor preview release today. What is it? The Visual Pipeline Editor is the simplest way for anyone wanting to get started with creating Pipelines in Jenkins. It’s also a great way for advanced Jenkins users to start adopting pipeline. It allows developers to break up their pipeline into different stages and parallelize tasks that can occur at the same time - graphically. The rest is up to you. A pipeline you create visually will produce a Declarative Pipeline Jenkinsfile for you and the Jenkinsfile is stored within a Git repository where it is versioned with your application code. If you are not sure what a Jenkins Pipeline or a Jenkinsfile is, why not check out the new guided tour to learn more about it? What are we doing next? We are working hard to provide feature parity between the Declarative Pipeline syntax and the visual editor. The next phase is to integrate the editor into Blue Ocean so that you don’t have to leave the UI and commit the Jenkinsfile to your repository to complete authoring your pipeline. In Blue Ocean, you will be able to edit a Jenkinsfile for a branch directly from within the user interface using the Visual Pipeline Editor. When you are done authoring your pipeline, the pipeline definition will be saved back to your repository as a Jenkinsfile. You can edit the Pipeline again using the Visual Editor or from your favorite text editor. We are hoping to deliver this level of integration into Blue Ocean and the Visual Pipeline Editor over the next few months, so be sure to check regularly for updates in the Jenkins plugin manager. Get the Preview The Visual Pipeline Editor is available in preview today. To try it out today: Install the Blue Ocean beta and Blue Ocean Pipeline Editor from the Jenkins plugin manager Click on the Open Blue Ocean button and then the Pipeline Editor in the main navigation We are looking forward to your feedback to help make the Visual Pipeline Editor the easiest way to get started with Jenkins Pipeline. To report bugs or to request features please follow the instructions on the project page. And don’t forget to join us on our Gitter community chat - drop by and say hello!