Jenkins (software)
Jenkins (software)
Jenkins is an open-source automation server used for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). It is written in Java and provides a web-based interface for managing build, test, and deployment pipelines. Originally forked from the Hudson project in 2011, Jenkins became one of the most widely adopted tools in the DevOps ecosystem due to its extensible plugin architecture and large community.
Jenkins supports building, testing, and deploying software across a variety of platforms and languages. It integrates with version control systems (e.g., Git, Subversion), build tools (e.g., Apache Maven, Gradle, Ant), and cloud services (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure). The project is maintained by the Jenkins Community under the Jenkins Project umbrella.
History
Jenkins was created as a fork of the Hudson project following a dispute with Oracle Corporation over trademark and governance. The first release, Jenkins 1.396, was made available on February 3, 2011. The fork rapidly gained community support, and by 2012 the majority of Hudson developers had moved to Jenkins. In 2019, the project introduced Jenkins 2, which added native pipeline support through a Groovy-based domain-specific language (DSL) and declarative pipelines.
Features
- Pipeline as Code: Define build, test, and deployment steps in a Jenkinsfile stored alongside source code.
- Plugin Ecosystem: Over 1,800 plugins integrate Jenkins with tools like Docker, Kubernetes, JUnit, and Selenium.
- Master/Agent Architecture: Distribute workloads across multiple machines for parallel execution.
- Web-Based UI: Manage jobs, view logs, and monitor builds through a web interface.
- Extensibility: Customize every aspect via plugins, scripts, and APIs.
- Built-in Security: Role-based access control, credentials management, and support for LDAP/Active Directory.
Ecosystem
Jenkins integrates with numerous CI/CD tools and platforms. The Jenkins Blue Ocean plugin provides a modern, visual pipeline editor. The project is partially funded by companies such as CloudBees, which offers a commercial distribution called CloudBees CI. Jenkins is also available as a Docker image and can be deployed on Kubernetes.