Recent Blog Posts

With more than a thousand public plugins in the Jenkins community now, it should come as no surprise that some of them are no longer actively maintained. Plugin authors move on when they change jobs, or lose interest in the plugin, and that’s fine. Plugins are hosted on the Jenkins project infrastructure after all, and when a maintainer moves on, others can continue their work. The major problem of course is that it’s often difficult to tell whether a plugin is still maintained (and there’s just not a lot going on), or whether its maintainer has lost interest. Most plugins don’t get released every few weeks, or even every few months, and still do their job just fine. To connect plugins that aren’t actively maintained with potential maintainers, we recently implemented the "Adopt-a-plugin" initiative: We built a list of plugins that are up for "adoption", and display a prominent message on the plugins' wiki pages. Anyone interested in taking over as a plugin maintainer can then contact us, and we’ll set you up. Are you interested in becoming a plugin maintainer? Maybe one of your favorite plugins isn’t actively maintained right now. Check out the Adopt a Plugin page for more details on this program, and a list of plugins that would benefit from your help.

As you may have noticed, our wiki and issue tracker were unavailable from Thursday to Sunday last week. What happened? We host parts of our infrastructure at the Open Source Lab at Oregon State (OSUOSL), including the databases for these two services. So far, there’s no post mortem by OSUOSL (they expect to post one later this week), so we need to piece together what we know. The databases for the wiki and issue tracker became inaccessible around midnight/12 AM Thu/Fri night (all times UTC). Due to the large number and size of databases on that server, pulling from backups, restoring from backup and replaying the binlogs took them quite a while. During that time, we put up a maintenance screen on the wiki (and messed up the one for Jira, so there were connection timeouts instead). The databases were back around 3 AM on Sunday. We disabled the maintenance screens around 6 PM later that day. While this was a rather lengthy outage, it could have been much worse. We lost none of the data, after all. We thank the OSUOSL team for their efforts getting everything back up over the weekend!

After several months of inactivity, office hours, the bi-weekly meeting of Jenkins users and developers to learn more about Jenkins, are back. I’ll host the first session next Wednesday at 11 am PDT. This session will be about Stapler, focusing on what Jenkins plugin authors need to know about it, e.g. request routing, form submission handling, or how Jelly/Groovy views work. While this is going to be a developer-focused session, future session topics will also have Jenkins users as target audience. For general information on office hours, and how to join, see the wiki.

Let’s say you’re browsing the 'Available' tab in the Jenkins plugin manager for interesting-looking plugins. How do you learn more about them, preferably without installing them on your production instance? You click the plugin’s name, which usually links to the plugin’s wiki page, of course! Unfortunately, it’s possible for plugins to be published without a wiki page, or any other documentation aside from what’s provided in the plugin itself. This is really unfortunate, as users rely on wiki pages and similar documentation to learn more about a plugin before installing or upgrading it, like its features, limitations, or recent changes. Additionally, plugin wiki pages have a special section at the top that provides an automatically generated technical overview of the plugin, such as dependencies to other plugins, the minimum compatible Jenkins version, a list of developers, and links to the source code repository and issue tracker component. Everyone learning about or using a plugin benefits from a plugin wiki page and luckily, almost all plugins have one! To ensure that every plugin has at least a basic wiki page with some documentation, we decided to only publish plugins in the Jenkins update center that have and link to a wiki page. To keep the impact to a minimum, we’re implementing this plan in several stages. The first stage went live on June 1: All existing plugins that don’t have a (valid) wiki link got a wiki link assigned by the update center (a so-called 'override'), either to an existing wiki page if there was one, or a generic"This plugin has no documentation" wiki page otherwise. This ensures that no currently existing plugins get dropped from the update center at this point. Of course, new plugins that don’t provide a wiki URL and don’t have an override URL will not show up at all. The second stage will be enabled later this year: We’re planning to remove all the overrides mentioned above. At this point, plugins may get removed from the update center if they still don’t specify a wiki URL. Of course this isn’t our goal, and we’ll try to work with plugin authors to prevent this from happening. So what can you do? Check the current overrides list to see whether the plugins you care about are affected, and if so, see the landing page in the wiki to learn what you can do. If you have any questions about this process not covered by the wiki, ask us on the Jenkins developers mailing list.

+ image:https://jenkins-ci.org/sites/default/files/images/Jenkins_Butler_0.png[image,width=114,height=128] + + In the fall of 2011, the very first Jenkins User Conference was held in San Francisco. Over 250 people showed up. It was, to be completely honest, a bit shocking to me - that little project I’d gotten involved with less than three years earlier was big enough, interesting enough, important enough for 250 people to travel from around the world to spend a day talking about it? That’s an amazing feeling, and it was an amazing day. Since then, there’ve been three more JUCs in the Bay Area, three in Israel and two in Europe, with more talks on more Jenkins subjects and an ever-increasing number of attendees. This year, there are another four scheduled - three of them for two days each this time! Find out more about the first two, JUC US East and JUC Europe, below! + + Not only are there enough worthy talks to merit a full day a few times a year - now there are enough to merit two days! At JUC US East 2015 outside Washington, DC on June 18 and 19, you can see talks on the Workflow plugin for Jenkins, test automation, mobile testing, plugin development, and a few talks on new and fascinating ways people are using Jenkins - even driving big data workflows! And then, just a few days later, on June 23 and 24 in London, there’s JUC Europe 2015, with talks covering things like the fantastic Job DSL plugin, reproducible build environments, Jenkins and Docker together, and my personal favorite, the 2015 edition of my Seven Habits of Highly Effective Jenkins Users talk. + + Whether you’re interested in the latest innovations in continuous integration and delivery, or you’re a Jenkins plugin developer wanting to learn how to make your plugins more mature and useful, or you’re a Jenkins administrator trying to understand how to provide your users with a great platform for their builds and testing, or even if you’ve just heard about CI/CD and you want to find out more, the Jenkins User Conferences are a great opportunity to see all those things and meet with other Jenkins users and developers. I’m excited to attend my fifth JUC in London, and I hope to see you there! + + + image:https://jenkins-ci.org/sites/default/files/images/smallerme.jpeg[image,width=150,height=188] + + This post is by Andrew Bayer, build and tools architect at Cloudera and longtime Jenkins contributor. If you have your ticket to JUC Europe, you can attend his talk"Seven Habits of Highly Effective Jenkins Users" on Day 1. + + Still need your ticket to JUC? Early bird pricing ends May 15. Also, if you register with a friend you can get 2 tickets for the price of 1! Register here for a JUC near you. + + + + + + + Thank you to our sponsors for the 2015 Jenkins User Conference World Tour: + + + image:https://jenkins-ci.org/sites/default/files/images/sponsors-06032015-02_0.png[image,width=598,height=579] +

+ As the Jenkins project grows, https://jenkins-ci.org/content/come-join-infra-team[the need for our infrastructure has been growing]. https://ci.jenkins.io/[Our Jenkins-on-Jenkins] needs more build agents, we need more servers to run our infrastructure services. + + + And it was https://jenkins-ci.org/content/big-thanks-rackspace[once again] Rackspace who stepped up to the plate; they have kindly donated us more https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/[cloud servers]. I also use Rackspace for one of my personal servers, and when I went back to their admin console this time, I noticed that they've added https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/[a lot more services] to their offering. + + + image:https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://agentdero.cachefly.net/continuousblog/rackspace.jpg[image,width=200,height=200] + + + + I am setting up these boxes as I write this. A huge thank you for Rackspace for their support of this project. And if you are interested in using Rackspace cloud servers as elastic build agents, https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/JClouds+Plugin[jclouds plugin] is your friend.

Until now, Jenkins plugins written in Java or Groovy could only be built with Maven, using the maven-hpi-plugin to generate a proper manifest and archive which Jenkins can consume. But starting now, you can also use Gradle! See the wiki for information on how you can use Gradle and the new gradle-jpi-plugin to build, test and release your Java or Groovy Jenkins plugin.

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!