Introduction
As seen in the previous articles on Jenkins, you can deploy plugins to which are the primary means of enhancing the functionality of a Jenkins environment to suit organization- or user-specific needs. There are over a thousand different plugins which can be installed on a Jenkins controller and to integrate various build tools, cloud providers, analysis tools, and much more.
Plugins can be automatically downloaded, with their dependencies, from the Update Center. The Update Center is a service operated by the Jenkins project which provides an inventory of open source plugins which have been developed and maintained by various members of the Jenkins community.
How to install a plugin through UI ?
You can easily install a Plugin through the menu “Manage Jenkins” / Manage Plugins.
Under the Available tab, plugins available for download from the configured Update Center can be searched and considered:
You can also install the most recently released version of a plugin. In cases where an older release of the plugin is desired, a Jenkins administrator can download an older .hpi archive and manually install that on the Jenkins controller.
Assuming a .hpi file has been downloaded, a logged-in Jenkins administrator may upload the file from within the web UI:
- Navigate to the Manage Jenkins > Manage Plugins page in the web UI.
- Click on the Advanced tab.
- Choose the .hpi file under the Upload Plugin section.
- Upload the plugin file.
Best Plugins to know
SCM Plugins
- Git Plugin : allows use of Git as a build SCM, including repository browsers for several providers
- GitHub/GitLab Pull Request Builder : allows the developers to easily automate code review.
Build and Pipelines Plugins
- Promote builds : implement gate for approval
- Maven Integration : read the project dependencies from the POM file and builds relevant files
- Blueocean : Sophisticated visualizations of CD pipelines, pipeline editor, Native integration for branch and pull requests, etc
- Copy Artifact : lets you specify which build to copy artifacts from (e.g. the last successful/stable build, by build number, or by a build parameter)
- Artifact deployer : enables you to archive build artifacts to any remote locations such as to a separate file server
Cloud Plugins
- Dockerhub Notification : Plugin allows dockerhub to trigger jenkins
- Docker build and registry : Plugin allows publishing to dockerhub
- Amazon EC2 : manage Jenkins cloud slaves and deploy mechanism for Docker-based applications on a cluster.
- Kubernetes : The main feature is that it creates the pods for docker images and ends after each build
Backup Plugins
- ThinBackup : creates the backup with the job history
Alerting, Reporting
- JIRA Plugin : automatically creates the link all matching issue names to JIRA
- Email-ext allows more customization than the default email plugin, e.g. from the plugin’s page: “when an email is sent, who should receive it, and what the email says”.
- HTML Publisher : useful to publish HTML reports
Monitoring
- Disk Usage : you can see project list with occupied disk space
- Build Monitor : provides a highly visible view of the status of selected Jenkins jobs
Logging and Security Plugins
- Audit trail : tracks changes to Jenkins
- Job configuration History : Plugin tracks changes to jobs
That’s all for today ! Thanks !
