This was done as a proof of concept and should not be used. Any future work on a visual pipeline editor that was inspired by this is being moved to https://github.com/jenkinsci/blueocean-pipeline-editor-plugin

NOTE: this plugin is experimental. It is likely to abruptly change course in design or source code. It may set your hair on fire. Consider yourself warned before using.

The visual pipeline editor supports a stage centric view of Workflow. You expand stages to see the steps within:

Clicking on a step will load the editor specific to that plugin:

or

You can of course add more steps, from a choice of pre-made types:

The steps are implemented in src/main/js/steps and the intention is to make it extensible (by this and other plugins).

Parallelism is supported as first class. As you can guess by the branching and joining lines shown above. Any set of steps can be split up into parallel branches of execution:

You can then add more steps to each parallel branch, or more branches, as needed (and you can convert back too).

This is a regular Jenkins plugin (although using various javascript tools) so you can run it using the usual

mvn hpi:run or build it using mvn install if you want to install it in an existing Jenkins master (note the experimental status, it may blow up in your face!).

Create a new job of the Workflow type, and click "edit" next to the drop down that choses the type of editor you want to use for Workflow:

Then Click save. It will have saved the workflow and you can execute it (it uses a pre-canned test repo just to show it works end to end).

This plugin should be available on the experimental update center.

You can try a preview release if you are unable to run mvn. To use this, please first install the depndencies mentioned on that url, before installing the hpi into your Jenkins instance. Remember this is experimental/preview status.

Run mvn hpi:run as it is a normal plugin.

To work with the JavaScript, you run the following (in another window):

npm install

npm install -g gulp

gulp bundle && gulp rebundle

This will set up the js tooling needed and automatically build the changes to the source js which is stored in main/js to the plugin directory (just reload the browser after that).

Right now a json DSL is used (see json.js) (and stored in the jenkins config.xml) to keep the state of the UI and pipeline. On change events, a workflow script (via toWorkflow) is emitted and stored in the config.xml for actual execution.

The plugin regularly logs it to the console (in the browser), but it is also stored in the config(xml) of the Workflow Job.

This JavaScript heavy plugin is possible because of https://github.com/tfennelly/jenkins-js-modules and libs made available by: https://github.com/tfennelly/jenkins-js-libs/

This means that namespaced, clean js libraries and css can be made available to any Jenkins plugin that needs it. Ideally, you use the common jQuery, or any library, but if you really need your own, this framework can support it. Using modern js tools like gulp and less make for a smooth development workflow (I like to call it "refresh driven development").