Jenkins Plugins are very important part of CI/CD tool Jenkin. By default Jenkins has lot of functionality but if you want to add more functionality to perform the tasks then you can go ahead and install its Plugins. These are open source and can be installed automatically via Jenkins GUI or it can also be installed manually by downloading required plugins.
Let’s install it via GUI first.
Click on Manage Jenkins.
It will redirect you to a page where you will have lot of options to manage Jenkins. Click on “Plugins” here and it will open a page for you.
Please have a look to the image above you will find options like Available Plugins, Installed Plugins etc. You can use these options to manage plugins.
If you want to see installed plugin then just click on installed plugins.
From above image you can see all installed plugins. There is also option to enable or disable the plugins. Now let’s install a plugin. I want to install a plugin which helps me to perform Ansible tasks. I have searched for Ansible. I got two option one is Ansible while other one is Ansible Tower. I will select “Ansible” and Click on install.
You can also restart it while installing Jenkins Plugins. But make sure at that moment no jobs are running.
Now you can go ahead to Installed Plugins section and you will find it there enabled.
You have Ansible functionality in Jenkins. Try to push adhoc command or run playbooks. You can click on Ansible Plugin to check more details about it. Below is the redirected link of Ansible Plugin.
Now let’s try to install by downloading plugin package and install it via GUI. We will uninstall the above Ansible plugin first and reinstall it by other method.
You need to go to Installed Plugin option and Click on (X) sign with installed plugin.
It will prompt you for confirmation and click on Yes. It will uninstall it. You need to restart the Jenkins Service.
Open the Jenkins Plugins website and search for Ansible Plugins. I reached at:
On the above URL you will get an option “How to install”. Click on it. It will show you three option and here we are going with third option “Using direct upload”.
When you click on the option, it will open a page where all release are available. Download the desired one. The downloaded file will have .hpi extension.
Now login to Jenkins and again go to Manage Jenkins -> Plugins -> Advanced Settings. Now upload the file and click on deploy.
You can see in Installed Plugin now that Ansible is there.
Note: The most important thing while installing Jenkins Plugin manually is that the dependencies related to plugins need to be installed by you as well.
There is also a method where you can download the *.hpi file and move it to Jenkins Plugin location “/var/lib/jenkins/ plugins” and rename it *.jpi extensions. Now restart Jenkins and it will show as installed plugin.
The final way of installation of Plugin is by using “Jenkins CLI”. There is an option in “Manage Jenkins” from where you can take help of Jenkins CLI. Now let’s install a Jenkin Plugin via CLI.
As of now, we don’t have Jenkins-cli. So we will install it first after downloading it.
I have uploaded file to /var/lib/jenkins/ and will install it from here.
# systemctl status jenkins
● jenkins.service - Jenkins Continuous Integration Server
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/jenkins.service; enabled; preset: disabled)
Active: active (running) since Sat 2024-06-22 10:13:03 IST; 52ms ago
Main PID: 777623 (java)
Now you can check via GUI. It will be there as installed.