Jenkins plugins explained

Jenkins CI already provides certain functionality, including building, deploying, and automating software projects. Any additional behavior that you want out of Jenkins is generally provided by the large plugin ecosystem in Jenkins.

Why are plugins useful?

The purpose of plugins/extensions in software is to add specific functionality to a software component. Web browsers such as Chrome have extensions that extend the functionality of the browser and Firefox has add-ons that serve the same purpose as extensions in Chrome. There also exist plugins in other software systems, but we will specifically focus on plugins in Jenkins.

Jenkins plugin documentation

Go to the Plugin Index to find any plugins that you need, and we will look at this in a later section of this chapter. If you visit the plugin tutorial in the Jenkins wiki, you will get complete instructions on creating Jenkins plugins. There are also tutorials outside of the Jenkins wiki that you can use. You can go...