9 Best Jenkins Project Ideas & Topics [For Beginners & Experienced]

Jenkins is an open-source tool popular among DevOps professionals. It facilitates continuous integration and is built in Java. If you’re learning about DevOps and automation, you should know about Jenkins as it’s among the most famous DevOps teams’ tools. DevOps teams use this tool throughout the development cycle of a software product. 

The best way to learn about a tool like Jenkins is by working on its projects. That’s why we’ll discuss our top Jenkins project ideas in this article. Our projects are for various skill levels so you can choose according to your interests and experience.

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Let’s begin:

Our Top Jenkins Project Ideas

Prerequisites

Note that before you start working on any of the following Jenkins projects, you should have sufficient knowledge of Java. Jenkins is based on Java, and therefore, you should be familiar with its syntax and implementations. Otherwise, you’d struggle to complete some of the projects we’ve discussed below. Some projects require additional skills. 

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1. Blue Ocean

This is a project you should learn about while working with Jenkins. Blue Ocean allows users to create, diagnose, and visualize CD (Continuous Delivery) Pipelines through graphics. It simplifies the usage of Jenkins by offering a unique and easy to use graphical interface. Whether you’re new to Continuous Delivery pipelines or have some experience, you’ll find it relatively easy to learn.

Blue Ocean has become an integral part of Jenkins since its arrival, and that’s why you must learn about its working. Learning about Blue Ocean will ensure that you know how Jenkins works and how you can use it for Continuous Delivery. Its visualization features allow you to represent pipelines in such a way that you can show them to non-technical users as well. The simple representation makes the diagnosis of problems easy too. You can easily find errors by using the visualization and rectify them quickly. 

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All in all, learning about Blue Ocean would benefit you greatly in getting familiar with Jenkins. 

2. Jenkins Infrastructure

Jenkins is an open-source technology. This means its code is available to everyone openly. If you’re a seasoned programmer and want to showcase your expertise, you can contribute to its infrastructure. It would look great on your CV and help you learn a lot about collaborative tasks. You’ll also get to experience how open-source technologies get better while assisting Jenkins to become better.

There are various ways to contribute to Jenkins Infrastructure. You can contribute to their website or the primary infrastructure of the technology. To contribute towards the site, you’ll have to use HTML, whereas you’ll need to implement Ruby for infrastructure contribution. It has a thriving community of developers and contributors, who would gladly help you in case you face any issues. You can go here to learn more about Jenkins Infrastructure.

3. Jenkins Remoting Project 

This is an excellent project idea for networking students and enthusiasts. It would allow you to learn Jenkins’s networking applications and see how you can enhance its implementation. Jenkins Remoting is an archive and a library to implement a communication layer. It has TCP protocols, data streaming, procedure calls, etc. Because it’s based on TCP protocols, the failure of the same causes the agent’s connection to fail too. The protocols cause hindrances when multiple agents communicate through it as well. These drawbacks affect the scale and stability of Jenkins.

So in this project, you can improve Jenkins Remoting. You can do so by making it compatible with a message bus/queue technology (ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ). It could act as the fault-tolerant layer for Jenkins. To complete this project, you should be familiar with the basics of networking, message queues, and Java. 

4. Improve Jenkins ATH

Jenkins ATH (Acceptance Test Harness) is a tool for testing DSL libraries and Jenkinsfiles before deploying them. However, the old version of this tool has several drawbacks:

• It has to bootstrap a complete instance for every test method, so it is relatively slow in performance
• Real environments usually require an exact set of plugins and their versions 

You can improve Jenkins ATH by fixing both of these issues. If you haven’t worked on any Jenkins projects before, you can start fixing one of these problems first and then move onto solving the next one. To complete this project, you should be familiar with Docker and Selenium, along with Java. 

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5. Plugin for the Discard Builds Step

In this project, you have to create a plugin that gives users the ability to manage their data retention policy more appropriately. The plugin should allow users to implement the policy to build artifacts, histories, and workspaces. Usually, the administrators of a task have to handle this problem, but providing project contributors with the ability to implement their data retention policy would be more suitable. Your plugin should enable users to create and define their data retention policy using a pipeline build step. 

You can improve the Discard Old Builds facility and make it more suitable for code. You can focus on offering more features than the current Discard Old Builds facility offers. The working of your plugin can be in two sections. First, it would select the builds it has to discard according to a particular job’s history. Then it should discard the builds that it added to its list. 

It’s one of the most interested Jenkins projects, and you’d get to learn a lot by completing it. You can use the Run Selector Plugin as the basis for your project. 

6. Code Coverage

You can build a plugin that performs code coverage. While it’s among the most common Jenkins project ideas, you can take it a step further by making your code coverage tool unique and powerful. For example, you can merge multiple code coverage tools into one and make your plugin more versatile and practical. If you’re a beginner, you can build a simple code coverage plugin only. On the other hand, if you’re a seasoned Jenkins programmer, you can make the project more challenging by following the idea we’ve shared here, i.e., combine different plugins into one.

Apart from Java, you’ll have to implement HTML and CSS in this project too. They will help you in making the structure and appearance of your tool better and more appealing. 

7. EDA Tools

Electronic Design Automation (EDA in short) tools are quite popular among engineers due to the various advantages. You can build a plugin that integrates one EDA tool with Jenkins, enhancing the performance of both of them at once. Integrating the EDA tool with Jenkins will allow users to perform many tasks they would’ve been unable to achieve before. For example, they can publish timing reports, use other Jenkins plugins according to their requirements, launch Pipeline jobs with steps, etc. 

There are many open-source EDA tools available in the market. You can pick from any one of those open-source tools (FuseSoC, icetools, Yosys, etc.), or choose some other means of your liking. If you’re a beginner, you can start with one EDA tool and integrate it with Jenkins. On the other hand, you can make this task more challenging by integrating different EDA tools with various Jenkins plugins. It’s an excellent project to learn the applications of Jenkins in the field of engineering. 

8. External Storage for Jenkins Fingerprint

Jenkins stores artifacts, credentials, their usage history, and other relevant data through its Fingerprinting engine. The engine has an XML database with various WebUIs to facilitate its operation. You can make a Jenkins plugin that allows the Jenkins Fingerprinting engine to store its external storage data.

Many organizations might have to export their data to another storage for various reasons (e.g., low storage in the engine). Your solution would allow users to export their data from the engine and use it for other purposes. You should have some experience in working on Jenkins projects before you start working on this one. 

You’d have to use JavaScript, REST API, and Java to complete this task. You should also be familiar with databases and their operations as you’d be working with them in this project. 

9. Job Converter for Jenkins

Jenkins is a tool for Continuous Delivery, and so it focuses on Pipelines for efficiency. However, we all know that many jobs are freestyle and not Pipeline-based. You can build a tool for Jenkins that converts freestyle jobs into pipeline jobs. The device would have to migrate the freestyle job data to its database and arrange it into a Pipeline job.

As a beginner, you can keep the project simple by making a simple migration and conversion tool. On the other hand, you can make it more challenging by making it capable of migrating multiple freestyle jobs and convert them into a single Pipeline job.

Your tool would have two sections, one for data migration, and another for conversion. You should be familiar with Groovy (the language responsible for Jenkins Pipeline), Python, Java, XML, and Jenkins Pipelines to work on this project. 

Learn More about Jenkins and Continuous Delivery

We’ve reached the end of our list. We hope you found our Jenkins project ideas helpful. Working on these projects will help you in becoming a better Jenkins user and developer. It would give you experience in Continuous Delivery implementations too. If you want to learn more about Jenkins and Continuous Delivery, we recommend heading to our blog. You will find many valuable and exciting resources (like this one) on our blog. Here are two for your further reading:

• Jenkins Salary in India
• What is Jenkins? History, Architecture and More
• Jenkins Interview Questions

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