One cool benefit of the SSH-based design is that you can use SSH keys to authenticate to the server. You can generate a key pair via ssh-keygen -t rsa && cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and copy the resulting public key into the SSH keys section at http://YOUR_JENKINS_HOSTNAME/user/YOUR_USERNAME/configure . If you use this approach, know that ssh-agent is not supported, meaning you need to either enter a passphrase constantly or skip having one.