Working with Jenkins Blue Ocean plugin

The Blue Ocean plugin is a user interface (UI) plugin added in Jenkins to provide a modern and more intuitive way to visualize and manage continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are methods in software development that mainly focus on automating and streamlining the building, testing, and deploying code modifications. This plugin is introduced to enhance the user experience of working with Jenkins Pipelines and building data.

Here are some key features of the Blue Ocean plugin:

• Visual Pipelines: The visual interface for Pipelines is more intuitive and provides a clear overview of the pipeline's status.

• Interactive visualization: Blue Ocean offers an interactive pipeline visualization that allows the user to see each stage’s progress and the status of individual steps in real time.

• Pipeline editor: Blue Ocean has a visual Pipeline editor that makes creating and modifying Pipeline configurations easy. 

• Pipeline rerun and debugging: Rerunning individual steps in a Pipeline can be helpful for debugging issues or testing specific parts of the pipeline.

• GitHub integration: Blue Ocean integrates seamlessly with GitHub repositories, allowing users to connect the Jenkins pipeline to the GitHub repository and automatically trigger builds whenever changes are made.

• Improved usability: The Blue Ocean UI is more user-friendly and accessible, particularly for beginners in Jenkins or CI/CD practices.

• Viewing Pipeline history and trends: Blue Ocean lets users view Pipeline run history and track trends over time. It helps users to recognize patterns and improvements in CI/CD processes.

Installation

To install the Blue Ocean plugin, we need to sign in to Jenkins using the Jenkins account username and password. If we don’t have an account already, we can make it here.

After logging in, we see the “Manage Jenkins” option on the Jenkins Dashboard.

The “Manage Jenkins” section has a “Manage Plugins” option. We can search for “blue ocean” and install the plugin in the available category. Once all the plugin parts are installed successfully, we can go back to the dashboard, and on the left side, enter the Blue Ocean UI through the “Open Blue Ocean” option.

In the Blue Ocean UI, we have several options to import projects, and we can choose the one we need. Here, we select GitHub and import the required repository.

Once the GitHub repository is connected to Blue Ocean, we can access the main Pipeline configuration screen.

Here, we can make a Pipeline with any element we want to add. We will make a simple Pipeline element to print a message. We make an “Initialize” element and add at least one step to it for saving and running. Then, we click the “add step” option to see several types of steps.

We choose the “Print Message” option, which opens a message box where we can write whatever we want and press “Save and run.”

On pressing that, we see a prompt asking the branch to save and run the element. We can either commit to an already available branch or create a new one.

If we want to use an already available branch, we can commit to it by checking the option.

Once we press the “Save & run” button, the element will run, and we can see if it is successful.

This way, we can use the Blue Ocean UI to make Pipelines for projects to make them more efficient.