Plugin Development Tutorials, Videos, and More

Mark Waite August 07, 2017

This is a guest post by Mark Waite, who maintains the git plugin, the git client plugin, and is a technical evangelist for CloudBees, Inc.

While developing the "Intro to Plugin Development" workshop for Jenkins World 2017, I was impressed by the many Jenkins plugin development videos, tutorials, and guides. Here are some of my favorite plugin development topics and links.

Plugin tutorial videos

Jenkins Online Meetup Plugin Development Part 1 - Basics - Steven Christou and Jesse Glick
Jenkins Online Meetup Plugin Development Part 2 - Web UI - Daniel Beck and Tom Fennelly
Writing your third plugin - Justin Ryan
Jenkins Hackathon session at TNG Technology Consulting - Kohsuke Kawaguchi

Plugin tutorial pages

Tutorial on jenkins.io
- Install a Java Development kit, for example AdoptOpenJDK 8 or 11
- Install the latest maven release
- Install your IDE (I like Netbeans, has the Jenkins/Stapler plugin to make plugin creation as easy as menu:File[New Project > Maven > Jenkins Plugin])

More details

Many of the Jenkins plugin development topics have dedicated pages of their own, including user interface, plugin testing, and javadoc.

User interface

UI samples plugin (bars, boxes, buttons, lists, notification, and syntax highlighting)
Understanding Jelly Tags from the Jenkins wiki
Form Validation from the Jenkins wiki
Jelly Form Controls from the Jenkins wiki
Jelly Tag Library Reference from jenkins.io
DataBoundConstructor in Basic Guide to Jelly usage
DataBoundSetter in google groups

Testing a plugin

Unit test from the Jenkins wiki
Jenkins test objects like JenkinsRule and the WithoutJenkins annotation
DataBoundConstructor in Basic Guide to Jelly usage
DataBoundSetter in google groups
Java unit testing tools like Hamcrest and AssertJ (and JenkinsMatchers)
Java unit testing rules like TemporaryFolder, Timeout, and DisableOnDebug
Java unit testing classes like Assume and Parameterized
Java unit testing mock frameworks like mockito and powermock

Javadoc

Mark will be presenting Intro to Plugin Development at Jenkins World in August. Register with the code JWFOSS for a 30% discount off your pass.

plugins

About the author

Mark Waite

Mark is a member of the Jenkins governing board, a long-time Jenkins user and contributor, a core maintainer, and maintainer of the git plugin, the git client plugin, the platform labeler plugin, the embeddable build status plugin, and several others. He is one of the authors of the "Improve a plugin" tutorial.