What is a plugin in Jenkins?
Jenkins plugins are extensions that provide additional features and capabilities to enhance the functionality of Jenkins. Users can choose any plugin from the available plugin section to do any specific task. Plugins help Jenkins integrate other external tools. For example, you can install the Prometheus plugin on Jenkins, which will help expose all the metrics of Jenkins. These exposed metrics can be used on the Prometheus server to scrape all the metrics of Jenkins, and later on, anyone can monitor the Jenkins metrics using Grafana. Jenkins also allows users to create their own custom plugins. Using plugins can automate various tasks on Jenkins. Plugins improve the detection of bugs and errors early in the development process, which increases the quality of the code. In summary, we can say plugins in Jenkins enable users to create more advanced CI/CD pipelines and automate various stages of the software development lifecycle.
How To Customize Jenkins Functionality With Plugins ?
Jenkins is an open-source tool used to automate the build, test, and deploy stages of software development. Jenkins provides many plugins to automate various stages of a CI/CD pipeline. In this guide, I will first discuss what Jenkins is. Then I will discuss what a plugin is and how they customize Jenkins functionality. After this, I will walk you through the different steps to customize Jenkins functionality with plugins. In this section, I will install a custom plugin to change the appearance of the Jenkins UI.