+ One of the few plugins that I still personally maintain is Active Directory plugin. In the past few months, I’ve been making steady improvements in this plugin, thanks to various inputs and bug reports given to me from the ClodBees customers. One of the recent fixes was to get the "remember me" feature finally working for Active Directory. This requires a relatively new Jenkins 1.556,...

The final LTS release of the 1.532.x line is out today. You can download it from the usual location. Changelog is here. Starting with the next 1.554.x LTS, the release model will switch to the train model, where we commit to dates and get whatever we can ship by that date. You can see the scheduled dates in our event calendar. Backporting window for 1.554.1 is...

+ Nio NIO-based Java Web Start (JNLP) agent handling is coming to 1.560. This will help you run a large number of JNLP agents more efficiently. A connected JNLP agent used to occupy one thread on the controller, but now it occupies none. Combined with the earlier change that eliminated threads from idle executors, now you can connect thousands of agents. All you have to do is...

+ I recently had an opportunity to visit a big Jenkins user on site, and one of the things they’ve told me is that building projects in the Maven job type is substantially slower than doing the same with the freestyle project type. This is partly expected, because this job type does more for you. For example, it automatically archives your build artifacts, fingerprints all the...

+ If you have agents that connect through Java Web Start (such as agents installed as Windows services), we have a good news for you. In case of a connection loss, this type of agents has been designed to automatically attempt to reconnect to the controller. This makes sense because you want these agents to remain online all the time, even if your janitor trips over...

(This is a guest post by Stephen Connolly) Every developer, at some stage, will be handed a project to maintain that somebody else was responsible for. If you are lucky, the developer will not have left the organization yet and you get a brief Knowledge Transfer as the developer packs up their desk before heading on to their new job. If you are unlucky, you...

This is a guest post by Mike Rowan, VP R&D at SendGrid. Q: Tell us a bit about what your service and plugin do. Who is it for? What are the highlights of your plugin? A: Loader.io is a simple-to-use cloud-based load testing service. The service is designed for developers and people who need to ensure applications are performing as they should. It allows developers to...

This is a guest post by Aske Olsson Extreme feedback is an incredibly powerful way to drive quality and accelerate your developer fast feedback loop. Having eXtreme Feedback Devices (XFDs) hooked up to your Jenkins jobs gives everyone on your team instant insight into the current software state. At customer after customer we’ve seen extreme feedback devices drive significant incremental productivity gains, so about a year...

Git plugin and TFS plugin are calling for interested parties to try out their 2.0 beta binaries before they get released. Git plugin 2.0 contains a major refactoring and UI simplifications, and TFS plugin contains a rewritten polling logic that does not require a workspace. If you think you’d benefit from these changes, please head to their respective beta testing page and try out the new...

+ Jenkins comes with the remoting library that it uses to communicate between a controller and agents. This is a pretty awesome library, I think, which served us well. One of the things this remoting layer does it to transfer the Java byte code on demand from the controller to agents on demand. This approach helps us keep agent deployment simple, as you don’t have to...