Chapter 2. Automating the Jenkins UI

In this chapter, we will be looking at a selection of different approaches that can be used to alter and enhance the Jenkins user interface (UI).

As with Jenkins as a whole, the Jenkins UI is highly customizable and has been clearly designed from the outset to be adaptable and extendable so that you can tailor and adapt it to fit your particular requirements and environment.

There are different ways in which you can customize the UI, ranging from purely look and feel cosmetic alterations to user input refinements, and then towards the automatic creation of Jenkins jobs and setting up a dynamic Slave Node provisioning system.

The focus and the most suitable approach is usually driven by the way in which Jenkins will be used; focusing on the areas that matter the most in a particular situation is usually where the most benefit is to be gained.

We will examine four of the most common use case scenarios in this chapter and the different ways in which the automation and development of the Jenkins UI could be helpful for each case.