Plugins for .NET Builds (Part 2)

Back for post number three. Hope you are enjoying my continuing series and the new look.

Work lunch (3 course) followed by work dinner (steakhouse) both on the same day does not make for being able to write a blog post on a Friday night.

...Saturday afternoon it is then...waiting for the next release of Jenkins (1.407). Hopefully today, probably tomorrow (Sunday, Melbourne time.)

Let's cleanup some loose ends from last week.

Installing Plugins - Updates, Installed and Advanced Tab

On the Manage Jenkins > Manage Plugins Page there are 4 tabs: Updates, Available, Installed and Advanced.

Updates: These are updates you plugins you have previously installed that your Jenkins server knows about since you last updated from the update center. Click on the checkboxes and click install...QED

Advanced: It actually flows for me to talk about this tab first. There are three things you can do on this page:

1. If you are behind a proxy (which I am at work) enter your server and authentication details. You can probably find these details in your default browser. Failing that, talk to the network administrator. Don't forget to hit submit to save changes.
2. If the update site is down or you have a plugin (.hpi) file (can we change this to .jpi :D) that is not available through the update center you can manually import it into Jenkins here.
3. If it is not already the URL field should be 'http://updates.jenkins-ci.org/update-center.json' (without the quotes). Don't forget to hit submit to save changes.
4. The fourth thing you can do is related to the third and you will probably need to do this a lot (unless it can be automated? Groovy script anyone?). Clicking the Check now button will check the update center URL for updates and populate both the Updates tab and the Manage Jenkins page (if there is a new version of Jenkins available).

Now for that Installed tab: Its good to know what plugins you have installed. With recent (last 6 months or so) feature updates you can do more on this page. Plugins can be disabled if you want, but perhaps more importantly you can for many of the plugins downgrade to the previously installed version. This can be useful if a plugin update is found to cause issues for you builds and you need to get up and running again before waiting for a bug fix. The same mechanism is used for installed versions of the Jenkins WAR file on the Manage Jenkins page.

That pretty much covers of the mechanics of plugin installation for now.

Next week: Building the Build (first .NET Build)

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Till next time....