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Show HN: UI improvements for Jenkins

92 points by kevinburke 13y ago

msoad 13y ago
Chrome extension is awesome! Our grumpy sys admin will no bother updating our Jenkins.
toomuchtodo 13y ago
Very nice!! I intend to implement this on our Jenkins instance this week.
thejosh 13y ago
Jenkins and many other tools are designed by developers, there needs to be a word for that... we just call it "developer design" - functional but ugly.
- chuckcode 13y ago
  Jenkins is especially bad with the transparent logos overlapping the butler image. A lot of developer designed tools have a simplicity like Hacker News or infinite possible customizations like X windows. Jenkins has neither of these attributes and often just seems painful to use
- markkanof 13y ago
  In a lot of cases it's only functional in the sense that it performs a function. To me functional but ugly implies a certain sort of delusion that while it might look ugly, it is really efficient to interact with, so therefore, it doesn't need to look nice. This is often not the case though. A lot of these developer designed interfaces end up being confusing, hard to navigate, and ugly.
- nadaviv 13y ago
  Related: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/this-is-what-happens-when-you-let-developers-create-ui.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/this-is-what-happen...
- kevinburke 13y ago
  To be fair they're working with a completely different set of constraints than this is - this is close to the Delta ticket redesign project if you could also use it for your delta ticket. They have to support every browser, every language, every platform, every ARIA recommendation, and make sure that everything is open source compliant, which is fairly tricky.
general_failure 13y ago
Screenshots?
pestaa 13y ago
Repo was starred in a heartbeat.
publicfig 13y ago
So thankful for the Chrome extension. Even more thankful to see some UI projects happening through Github. We use Jenkins every day around the office and I can't count the amount of times someone mentions just how... not pretty... or, worse, confusing the interface can be, especially moving out of jobs you normally focus in. It's a bunch of elements that make sense after a while of using it, but initially it's a bit much.
markkanof 13y ago
Great work. I've thought about doing this before, but good for you for putting in the effort to make it work, instead of just thinking about it like I did.
dwwoelfel 13y ago
I'm curious why you would want a "build now" button on every page. Isn't it easy to configure Jenkins to build on every post-push webhook from GitHub?
- benpink 13y ago
  That might be so. But not everyone uses GitHub, y'know?
  - drunkenfly 13y ago
    But everyone uses some other version control system, isn't it? Set Jenkins job to poll you source code repository...
    - falsedan 13y ago
      Sometimes I'm trying to improve a step, and want to test a quick change. Going from Build Configuration up to Build Overview to click on Run Build is slow and easy to forget, and I don't want to check something in just o trigger a build. Plus, TeamCity has 'Run Now' on every build-related page.
- securingsincity 13y ago
  We use jenkins and just yesterday I had changed the build process slightly so it also runs a different ant task post build without muddying our svn with empty commits,a perfectly acceptable reason to have a build now button .
pbiggar 13y ago
The skin is really nice. I'm a real jenkins hater (one of the reasons I started https://circleci.com https://circleci.com) and while I think this makes Jenkins look really nice, I also think a superficial change like this doesn't really solve the major usability problems that jenkins has. There's a huge amount wrong with Jenkins. My major gripe is that the world today has moved very much to "convention over configuration", also known as "usability". But Jenkins is firmly stuck behind. It's not wrong to say that nothing works out of the box, and you have to configure every little thing. CircleCI customers have told me they've literally spent 2 days configuring a jenkins box to even get it working, and are glad to be rid of it. One example of jenkins' backwardness is a post from the Jenkins lead last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6434194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6434194. Actual quote: "The literate plugin adds an Action to all Free-style projects that allows exporting these XML configuration snippets in a .zip file for unpacking into your project's source control." I don't mean to hate on this, just jenkins. This design is a real improvement, one that Jenkins has been unable to do in the entire 10 years it's been in existence. [disclaimer: obviously I have a massive massive bias against jenkins, as part of CircleCIs mission is vanquish it and its awful usability]
- mpermar 13y ago
  Fair enough to advocate for your project, which I btw find it very nice. However, xml configuration is really a weak argument. It is very rare that anyone needs to touch the XML files. In fact, when someone touches those files is normally due to either a very extreme case or more commonly lack of interest in learning how the admin UI works. Jenkins lets you manage absolutely everything from the UI, from the very beginning, which is pretty convention-over-configurationish. Also Jenkins' changes control system lets you track and diff every change very quickly.
  - pbiggar 13y ago
    Fair. My real gripe with jenkins is the UI configuration - the XML is a bit of a sideshow. I'll restructure my post slightly, thanks.
  - echohack 13y ago
matlock 13y ago
Jenkins has done a great job in getting continuous integration as a workflow into the hands of many developers. But their usability is completely out of date and their current user base doesn't let them evolve to where they would need to be. Especially integration with PaaS services like Heroku should just be there from the start, but has never been a focus for the Jenkins community which still seems to be very on-premise based with all of their infrastructure. More and more developers seem to be jumping on hosted solutions now (e.g. https://www.codeship.io https://www.codeship.io where I am one of the founders)
- eulerphi 13y ago
  Good job on having the typical non-biased flak-attack and also spamming your startup.
echohack 13y ago
This looks really awesome. We use Jenkins heavily for deploying applications from build all the way through production. I'll look into this and see what I can get out of it.
zmmmmm 13y ago
Looks nice. But then Jenkins is an extremely low bar to jump. I've always considered it kind of hilariously bad and at this point it would be kind of sad to see it improve ... it just wouldn't feel like Jenkins any more!
- taspeotis 13y ago
  > Jenkins is an extremely low bar to jump. I'm pretty fond of Bamboo's default (only?) theme [1]. Although the focus on building Java software is undeniable, we build a bunch of C# projects on it just fine (with its built-in MSBuild and MSTest tasks). Bamboo 5 brings "deployment projects" [2] which makes CI just that little bit easier. I've also used Hudson (ages ago: prior to it being forked) and although it's not a fair comparison, Bamboo is miles ahead. [1] https://www.atlassian.com/en/software/bamboo/overviewHero/imageBinary/build-results.png https://www.atlassian.com/en/software/bamboo/overviewHero/im... [2] https://confluence.atlassian.com/download/attachments/365658897/VersNam.png?version=1&modificationDate=1373345903342&api=v2&effects=border-simple,blur-border https://confluence.atlassian.com/download/attachments/365658...
FreshCode 13y ago
I opted to use TeamCity for all my CI exactly because of the UI. It's not perfect either, but I think it is vastly superior. Bigger install, though and relies on a JVM.
- borplk 13y ago
  is it free?
  - falsedan 13y ago
    The Professional license is free and gives 20 active build configurations & 3 simultaneous builds. I install extra instances if I need more.
- manojlds 13y ago
  You might also want to look at Go[1] from ThoughtWorks* - the UI and first class Pipeline support is it +ves. [1] - http://www.thoughtworks.com/products/go-continuous-delivery/compare http://www.thoughtworks.com/products/go-continuous-delivery/... * - I work for ThoughtWorks, but not associated with the Go team, and use Teamcity and Jenkins more than Go.
- shaggyfrog 13y ago
  Superior? Depends on what you're building. Using TeamCity to set up builds for iOS is a royal pain in the ass, and their OS X support in general is greatly lacking. I've had to create a whole ecosystem of shell scripts just to produce signed .ipa builds for QA -- which is kinda the point of purchasing a licence to a CI system to begin with.
Shish2k 13y ago
> Removes a lot of the useless icons The screenshot implies that it's removed all the icons - are icons universally considered useless now? I know I'm a sample of one, but I've always found the console icon to get "console output", the big red button for "delete", etc to be useful and unobtrusive... > The fonts are bigger. Way bigger. > More spacing in between list items. > Text inputs are friendlier, bigger For people using jenkins on their phones? :S I'm using it on a 1080p monitor, and even then I sometimes use my browser's zoom feature to zoom out so that I can fit more information on screen... I'm all for UI improvements, but this just seems like "replace things with bootstrap, because everything has to be like bootstrap now" :(
- kevinburke 13y ago
  11px is a pretty small default, below the recommended size. For links it also means a small target to click on. There's some context about icons here: http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/gmail-designer-arrogance-and-the-cult-of-minimalism/ http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/gmail-designer-ar... If they are universally acknowledgeable (a big red X, a red dot, a green dot) then yeah they make sense, otherwise they just lead to confusion about what they do. In this case I didn't think they were adding anything to the left hand marker so I removed them.
  - LaurentVB 13y ago
    Thanks for starting this. As a daily Jenkins user, I'm convinced there's a huge room for improvement re: UX. However, I think the icon removal is misguided. Default Jenkins icons are dated and probably too bold, but we shouldn't get rid of icons entirely. Menus change a lot in Jenkins (depending on context and rights). Having icons next to links makes it easier to spot the right action or menu item by scanning, instead of having to read it all. In my opinion, the link you cite does not at all justify removing icons. It says that having only icons (additionally, unclear ones) is an issue, with which I couldn't agree more. To add more feedback: - I love the new console output. - I think the font-size is better. - I like the more-roomy build history better. - I think you could replace the dated build-status and build-weather-report icons to something more modern and better-looking
ing33k 13y ago
will install this ASAP ..
mullr 13y ago
There's a lot of hate bouncing around here for Jenkins. Can we stop for a moment and remember what it meant to set up a build system before Jenkins was around? Sure, it's not rocket science, but Jenkins made things quite a lot easier and made continue integration actually possible to think about for many shops. It's no small feat that they managed to do this for n revision control systems * m languages with associated build systems and testing frameworks * q random options and make it still mostly work. Jenkins moved the minimum acceptable level of automation, for the industry, up quite a lot farther than it used to be. Say what you will but remember its impact, and that the guy who made it is quite possibly reading this thread.
drdaeman 13y ago
As for my personal tastes - and judging only by provided screenshots - I think the original looks better than redesign. Except for Courier New replacement to Consolas and console part, which, indeed, has to be white on black (or, better, light gray on black, white is for highlights), not the other way around. Probably that's the lack of primary navigation menu icons that I dislike the most.
cih 13y ago
This looks nice, a friend of mine made a nice simple dashboard showing jenkins build status if anyone is interested https://github.com/jackbot/jenkins-dashboard#screenshot https://github.com/jackbot/jenkins-dashboard#screenshot
michaelmior 13y ago
Somewhat off-topic, but if you're looking for a good OSS CI solution, you may want to check out Strider[1]. It has far fewer features then Jenkins, but it looks nice and is incredibly easy to deploy. If you want, you can just push straight to Heroku. Of course this leaves you somewhat restricted in what tools are available, but has worked well for me for simple Python and Node.js projects. [1] https://github.com/Strider-CD/strider/ https://github.com/Strider-CD/strider/
forgottenpass 13y ago
I see that you've got green orbs. Or, more specifically, I don't. I saw a build history with yellow and red orbs but had a hunch and used assistive software to discover that they were actually green. I don't really mind because I'll never put this on my boxes (I've never really minded that the jenkins UI is years behind design trends), but you may want to be aware of colorblindness when toting "UI improvements".

92 points by kevinburke 13y ago

msoad 13y ago

Chrome extension is awesome! Our grumpy sys admin will no bother updating our Jenkins.

toomuchtodo 13y ago

Very nice!! I intend to implement this on our Jenkins instance this week.

thejosh 13y ago

Jenkins and many other tools are designed by developers, there needs to be a word for that... we just call it "developer design" - functional but ugly.

chuckcode 13y ago
Jenkins is especially bad with the transparent logos overlapping the butler image. A lot of developer designed tools have a simplicity like Hacker News or infinite possible customizations like X windows. Jenkins has neither of these attributes and often just seems painful to use
markkanof 13y ago
In a lot of cases it's only functional in the sense that it performs a function. To me functional but ugly implies a certain sort of delusion that while it might look ugly, it is really efficient to interact with, so therefore, it doesn't need to look nice. This is often not the case though. A lot of these developer designed interfaces end up being confusing, hard to navigate, and ugly.
nadaviv 13y ago
Related: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/this-is-what-happens-when-you-let-developers-create-ui.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/this-is-what-happen...
kevinburke 13y ago
To be fair they're working with a completely different set of constraints than this is - this is close to the Delta ticket redesign project if you could also use it for your delta ticket. They have to support every browser, every language, every platform, every ARIA recommendation, and make sure that everything is open source compliant, which is fairly tricky.

general_failure 13y ago

Screenshots?

pestaa 13y ago

Repo was starred in a heartbeat.

publicfig 13y ago

So thankful for the Chrome extension. Even more thankful to see some UI projects happening through Github. We use Jenkins every day around the office and I can't count the amount of times someone mentions just how... not pretty... or, worse, confusing the interface can be, especially moving out of jobs you normally focus in. It's a bunch of elements that make sense after a while of using it, but initially it's a bit much.

markkanof 13y ago

Great work. I've thought about doing this before, but good for you for putting in the effort to make it work, instead of just thinking about it like I did.

dwwoelfel 13y ago

I'm curious why you would want a "build now" button on every page. Isn't it easy to configure Jenkins to build on every post-push webhook from GitHub?

benpink 13y ago
That might be so. But not everyone uses GitHub, y'know?
- drunkenfly 13y ago
  But everyone uses some other version control system, isn't it? Set Jenkins job to poll you source code repository...
  - falsedan 13y ago
    Sometimes I'm trying to improve a step, and want to test a quick change. Going from Build Configuration up to Build Overview to click on Run Build is slow and easy to forget, and I don't want to check something in just o trigger a build. Plus, TeamCity has 'Run Now' on every build-related page.
securingsincity 13y ago
We use jenkins and just yesterday I had changed the build process slightly so it also runs a different ant task post build without muddying our svn with empty commits,a perfectly acceptable reason to have a build now button .

pbiggar 13y ago

The skin is really nice. I'm a real jenkins hater (one of the reasons I started https://circleci.com https://circleci.com) and while I think this makes Jenkins look really nice, I also think a superficial change like this doesn't really solve the major usability problems that jenkins has. There's a huge amount wrong with Jenkins. My major gripe is that the world today has moved very much to "convention over configuration", also known as "usability". But Jenkins is firmly stuck behind. It's not wrong to say that nothing works out of the box, and you have to configure every little thing. CircleCI customers have told me they've literally spent 2 days configuring a jenkins box to even get it working, and are glad to be rid of it. One example of jenkins' backwardness is a post from the Jenkins lead last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6434194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6434194. Actual quote: "The literate plugin adds an Action to all Free-style projects that allows exporting these XML configuration snippets in a .zip file for unpacking into your project's source control." I don't mean to hate on this, just jenkins. This design is a real improvement, one that Jenkins has been unable to do in the entire 10 years it's been in existence. [disclaimer: obviously I have a massive massive bias against jenkins, as part of CircleCIs mission is vanquish it and its awful usability]

mpermar 13y ago
Fair enough to advocate for your project, which I btw find it very nice. However, xml configuration is really a weak argument. It is very rare that anyone needs to touch the XML files. In fact, when someone touches those files is normally due to either a very extreme case or more commonly lack of interest in learning how the admin UI works. Jenkins lets you manage absolutely everything from the UI, from the very beginning, which is pretty convention-over-configurationish. Also Jenkins' changes control system lets you track and diff every change very quickly.
- pbiggar 13y ago
  Fair. My real gripe with jenkins is the UI configuration - the XML is a bit of a sideshow. I'll restructure my post slightly, thanks.
- echohack 13y ago

matlock 13y ago

Jenkins has done a great job in getting continuous integration as a workflow into the hands of many developers. But their usability is completely out of date and their current user base doesn't let them evolve to where they would need to be. Especially integration with PaaS services like Heroku should just be there from the start, but has never been a focus for the Jenkins community which still seems to be very on-premise based with all of their infrastructure. More and more developers seem to be jumping on hosted solutions now (e.g. https://www.codeship.io https://www.codeship.io where I am one of the founders)

eulerphi 13y ago
Good job on having the typical non-biased flak-attack and also spamming your startup.

echohack 13y ago

This looks really awesome. We use Jenkins heavily for deploying applications from build all the way through production. I'll look into this and see what I can get out of it.

zmmmmm 13y ago

Looks nice. But then Jenkins is an extremely low bar to jump. I've always considered it kind of hilariously bad and at this point it would be kind of sad to see it improve ... it just wouldn't feel like Jenkins any more!

taspeotis 13y ago
> Jenkins is an extremely low bar to jump. I'm pretty fond of Bamboo's default (only?) theme [1]. Although the focus on building Java software is undeniable, we build a bunch of C# projects on it just fine (with its built-in MSBuild and MSTest tasks). Bamboo 5 brings "deployment projects" [2] which makes CI just that little bit easier. I've also used Hudson (ages ago: prior to it being forked) and although it's not a fair comparison, Bamboo is miles ahead. [1] https://www.atlassian.com/en/software/bamboo/overviewHero/imageBinary/build-results.png https://www.atlassian.com/en/software/bamboo/overviewHero/im... [2] https://confluence.atlassian.com/download/attachments/365658897/VersNam.png?version=1&modificationDate=1373345903342&api=v2&effects=border-simple,blur-border https://confluence.atlassian.com/download/attachments/365658...

FreshCode 13y ago

I opted to use TeamCity for all my CI exactly because of the UI. It's not perfect either, but I think it is vastly superior. Bigger install, though and relies on a JVM.

borplk 13y ago
is it free?
- falsedan 13y ago
  The Professional license is free and gives 20 active build configurations & 3 simultaneous builds. I install extra instances if I need more.
manojlds 13y ago
You might also want to look at Go[1] from ThoughtWorks* - the UI and first class Pipeline support is it +ves. [1] - http://www.thoughtworks.com/products/go-continuous-delivery/compare http://www.thoughtworks.com/products/go-continuous-delivery/... * - I work for ThoughtWorks, but not associated with the Go team, and use Teamcity and Jenkins more than Go.
shaggyfrog 13y ago
Superior? Depends on what you're building. Using TeamCity to set up builds for iOS is a royal pain in the ass, and their OS X support in general is greatly lacking. I've had to create a whole ecosystem of shell scripts just to produce signed .ipa builds for QA -- which is kinda the point of purchasing a licence to a CI system to begin with.

Shish2k 13y ago

> Removes a lot of the useless icons The screenshot implies that it's removed all the icons - are icons universally considered useless now? I know I'm a sample of one, but I've always found the console icon to get "console output", the big red button for "delete", etc to be useful and unobtrusive... > The fonts are bigger. Way bigger. > More spacing in between list items. > Text inputs are friendlier, bigger For people using jenkins on their phones? :S I'm using it on a 1080p monitor, and even then I sometimes use my browser's zoom feature to zoom out so that I can fit more information on screen... I'm all for UI improvements, but this just seems like "replace things with bootstrap, because everything has to be like bootstrap now" :(

kevinburke 13y ago
11px is a pretty small default, below the recommended size. For links it also means a small target to click on. There's some context about icons here: http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/gmail-designer-arrogance-and-the-cult-of-minimalism/ http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/gmail-designer-ar... If they are universally acknowledgeable (a big red X, a red dot, a green dot) then yeah they make sense, otherwise they just lead to confusion about what they do. In this case I didn't think they were adding anything to the left hand marker so I removed them.
- LaurentVB 13y ago
  Thanks for starting this. As a daily Jenkins user, I'm convinced there's a huge room for improvement re: UX. However, I think the icon removal is misguided. Default Jenkins icons are dated and probably too bold, but we shouldn't get rid of icons entirely. Menus change a lot in Jenkins (depending on context and rights). Having icons next to links makes it easier to spot the right action or menu item by scanning, instead of having to read it all. In my opinion, the link you cite does not at all justify removing icons. It says that having only icons (additionally, unclear ones) is an issue, with which I couldn't agree more. To add more feedback: - I love the new console output. - I think the font-size is better. - I like the more-roomy build history better. - I think you could replace the dated build-status and build-weather-report icons to something more modern and better-looking

ing33k 13y ago

will install this ASAP ..

mullr 13y ago

There's a lot of hate bouncing around here for Jenkins. Can we stop for a moment and remember what it meant to set up a build system before Jenkins was around? Sure, it's not rocket science, but Jenkins made things quite a lot easier and made continue integration actually possible to think about for many shops. It's no small feat that they managed to do this for n revision control systems * m languages with associated build systems and testing frameworks * q random options and make it still mostly work. Jenkins moved the minimum acceptable level of automation, for the industry, up quite a lot farther than it used to be. Say what you will but remember its impact, and that the guy who made it is quite possibly reading this thread.

drdaeman 13y ago

As for my personal tastes - and judging only by provided screenshots - I think the original looks better than redesign. Except for Courier New replacement to Consolas and console part, which, indeed, has to be white on black (or, better, light gray on black, white is for highlights), not the other way around. Probably that's the lack of primary navigation menu icons that I dislike the most.

cih 13y ago

This looks nice, a friend of mine made a nice simple dashboard showing jenkins build status if anyone is interested https://github.com/jackbot/jenkins-dashboard#screenshot https://github.com/jackbot/jenkins-dashboard#screenshot

michaelmior 13y ago

Somewhat off-topic, but if you're looking for a good OSS CI solution, you may want to check out Strider[1]. It has far fewer features then Jenkins, but it looks nice and is incredibly easy to deploy. If you want, you can just push straight to Heroku. Of course this leaves you somewhat restricted in what tools are available, but has worked well for me for simple Python and Node.js projects. [1] https://github.com/Strider-CD/strider/ https://github.com/Strider-CD/strider/

forgottenpass 13y ago

I see that you've got green orbs. Or, more specifically, I don't. I saw a build history with yellow and red orbs but had a hunch and used assistive software to discover that they were actually green. I don't really mind because I'll never put this on my boxes (I've never really minded that the jenkins UI is years behind design trends), but you may want to be aware of colorblindness when toting "UI improvements".