Plugin Site

This site is the new docs site currently being tested. For the actual docs in use please go to https://www.jenkins.io/doc.

This page explains how the plugins site works.

This is not a manual on how to use the site to e.g. find plugins, but rather explains how it gets its data and how plugin developers can change the data on it.

Data shown on the plugins site

Which plugins are listed? How can I make my plugin appear?

All plugins published to the current (weekly) update center are listed.

What is the plugin installation trend based on?

This uses the monthly data from https://stats.jenkins.io as gathered from Jenkins instances that have not opted out of reporting data.

Learn more on the usage statistics page.

What does "most installed" mean?

This ranks plugins by the number of different Jenkins instances that reported the plugin installed during the previous month.

What does 'Recently updated' mean?

This is based on metadata created by the update site generator, which uses the creation date of a plugin release.

Note that very recent plugin releases may not appear here due to caching and delays in data aggregation.

What does 'Trending' mean?

This is an attempt to capture the plugins whose popularity is growing rapidly. As we only have the monthly installation stats for this, it’s necessarily a worse approximation than what you’d likely see e.g. in app stores.

Currently (2019-10) this just divides the previous month’s install count by the month before that. Plugins with the greatest numbers are shown in descending order.

What are categories based on?

Categories are based on label-definitions.properties in the update-center2 GitHub repository.

See categorize the plugin for further documentation.

How are plugins labeled?

Plugin labels are assigned to plugin repositories by their maintainers as GitHub topics. GitHub topics that match entries from the plugin label allowlist are displayed on the plugin site. The plugin documentation guide includes instructions for documenting, categorizing, and labeling plugins.

Where does the description of the plugin come from?

The plugin site will pull content from a specified Markdown or AsciiDoc file in plugin’s GitHub repository, defaulting to the README file. See documentation for how to configure GitHub documentation.

In the past it was possible to use Jenkins Wiki as the source of documentation. After the wiki shutdown the contents are still available, but maintainers are encouraged to migrate the documentation to GitHub.

What is the maintainer information based on?

These are taken from the plugin’s latest released version’s metadata, and additionally (if not redundant) includes the user who released that version.

What’s the data source for Version, Dependencies and Display Name?

These are all taken from the plugin’s latest released version’s pom.xml metadata.

Implicit dependencies (plugins split from core) are included with '(Implied)' after the plugin name.

Data collection and caching

Wiki page data

The plugin site caches wiki pages as needed. The cached copy of each wiki page is marked invalid after several (2019-10: six) hours.

Statistics and other plugin metadata

The data for the plugins site is periodically collected based on the stats.jenkins.io data and the current update-center.json, and made available to the plugins site at a known URL.

The plugins site periodically (2019-10: every hour) updates its internal storage from that URL.