Despite facing new competition daily, Jenkins still provides the most popular continuous integrations in the ecosystem today. It was created due to the Hudson community split which occurred after Oracle took control of the once open source Hudson in a move that shocked the development community.

As of today, Jenkins has more than 1,500 integrations which allow you to solve almost any kind of problem you may face during deployment, development or testing. Jenkins’ integrations can provide help with different tasks ranging from continuous delivery, transferring of files from build to build, displaying Jenkins projects in JIRA, and much more.

Still, many developers don’t become aware of these useful integrations until they’re needed. To help you get acquainted with useful interrogations, I’ve gathered 6 of the best ones to increase your productivity, based on personal experience. Please feel free to comment and suggest more useful integrations!

1. Pipeline

Jenkins Pipeline allows you to script your build pipeline consisting of one or more build jobs into a single workflow. This integration makes the visuals of your pipeline much more simple, the monitoring of which parts of your build have been run and which jobs are still in your queue. The best part of Pipeline is that it’s integrated with the SCM, which let’s you develop your pipeline definition script using the correct tools and shows the changes, audit, run code reviews and more. The build pipeline can become the essential part of your working model when it comes to the CI.

2. JIRA

Since it is vital for you to track and organize your team’s different projects according to a chosen workflow building a list of the different projects at hand is necessary for teams to work together. For this, many teams of developers use JIRA that serves as a single destination from which to all solitary and joint development activity. To use JIRA you just have to connect JIRA to your Jenkins system configuration and you’re set. The Jenkins build up page will update JIRA with the help of a back pointer. By using the fingerprint feature other project’s build up will also be recorded with JIRA. With this plugin you will be able to maintain a clean and organized process of working on a lengthy project with minimal errors.

3. Build Failure Analyzer

Build Failure Analyzer plugin detects the causes of failed builds and presents them on the build page. It does this by using a knowledge base of build failure causes that it built from scratch. This plugin provides the opportunity to see the reasons for particular build failures within a job page and history, after you have created a sufficient knowledge base (which is simply a mapping from build log pattern to a problem name). Additionally, you can move to the problematic build log line with just one click.

4. WhiteSource Jenkins Integration

The WhiteSource Jenkins integration simplifies the managing of your open source components . This integration makes it easier to keep track of open source components, their licenses, risks, and requirements in your build. The plugin continuously and automatically updates the WhiteSource repository whenever a new open source component is added, to ensure that all the components are immediately reported, analyzed, and reviewed for approval. You get notified when a new release is available for any of the open source components you use, so that you are aware of fixes to security vulnerabilities, performance issues, and other bugs.

5. Copy Artifact Plugin

The Copy Artifact plugin will provide a build step to copy artifacts from one project to another. It provides you with the option to copy the needed files from one job to another where you are able to run tests. When using this plugin you choose which build you want to archive and copy artifact to a different build. The main concept of this plugin is that you can copy and reuse archive artifacts in different builds. This means that if you produce a JAR or other artifacts, you can instruct Jenkins to save it for later use. Once your jobs are working the way you set them up to you can start using those artifacts.

6. GitHub Pull Request Builder

GitHub Pull Request Builder provides support to automate code review from pull requests you are using from Github. This plugin merges and runs the build on the code as well as gathers necessary static analysis when configured or build results and provides the status of the pull request. This helps code reviewers receive the status of the code that is going to be merged. You can even define automatic merge if the build is approved.

Conclusion

If you are looking to increase developer productivity, Jenkins is definitely a great tool for the job, and so is its wide verity of features and plugins. These integrations and plugins become very helpful when it comes to reducing workloads through automation and organization. Downloading and integrating Jenkins is a quick and simple process and you have so many plugins to decide from whatever your workflow needs.