Chapter 9. The Blue Ocean Interface

As well as the new Declarative Pipeline syntax, one of the key innovations in Jenkins 2 is the new graphical interface, Blue Ocean. At a high level, we can summarize the features of Blue Ocean as follows:

  • Provides a graphical representation of pipeline processing

  • Provides a graphical interface for creating new Declarative Pipelines

  • Provides a more segmented view of pipeline processing at the level of the stages in the pipeline, including being able to drill into logs at that level

  • Supports views by branches for Multibranch Pipeline projects

  • Supports working with pull requests for Multibranch Pipeline projects

  • Provides a guided setup for new pipelines from source management repositories

  • Provides a pipeline editor based on adding stages, steps, etc., through a combination of interaction with graphical (point-and-click) elements and typing

  • Can better represent parallel stages in comparison to the Stage View output

  • Provides links back to the “classic” (legacy) Jenkins view for corresponding items or those that do not have a custom Blue Ocean representation

The interface keys off of the stage definitions in the pipeline and adds graphical elements to represent each stage. Those representations include circular icons and colors to represent the processing progress and the resulting states of success and failure.

You can also view logs segmented by steps and click through to get more details.

That’s the very high-level view of the new interface. ...

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