Siarhei

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This article discusses the author's experience with Jenkins and highlights its shortcomings such as high indirection, low discoverability, incomplete and unintuitive UI, and issues with running builds inside Docker containers.

Life is Too Short for Jenkins

<blockquote>
The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works. It can meet your needs. With a liiittle more effort, or by adopting sliiiightly lower standards, or with a liiiiitle more tolerance for pain, you can always get Jenkins to do aaaaalmost what you want it to.
</blockquote>
I couldn’t agree more! As a person who spend 3 years on Jenkins in 2014 - 2017, moving a small team to Jenkins 2, administrating a Jenkins instance, and, finally, writing my own plugin I double that. No, I triple, quadriple and millioniple that.
After touching some of its APIs a truth revealed to me, which I want to add to this article. The problem of Jenkins itself is that it is a 20 y.o. piece of legacy. It was one of the first CI servers available, a fork of Hudson (even older CI system). It’s a tool from the past epoch where there was no Docker, builds were completely local and target only a single platform. All these assumptions stay there in it’s API for the last 20 years. It’s virtually impossible to implement a modern CI on top of that.
So, folks, if you see Jenkins — either advocate to replace it with a modern CI server or service or run. Run for you live and career, because time spent on it is wasted time.

Very insightful , thank you !
as someone who just started to try play with jenkins and github actions, this offers clarity.