Chapter 4. The API and the CLI

In the previous chapter, we looked at several ways in which we can interact with Jenkins and extend its use so that developers can benefit directly from within their development environments.

The plugins and add-ons that we looked at were obviously, somehow, able to fetch "live" data from Jenkins in order to convey this data directly to the client environment (the developers' IDE).

In this chapter, we will take a look at how these plugins were able to access this information, and we will explore the various mechanisms and interfaces that Jenkins provides for programmatic interactions, for example, the Jenkins Application Programming Interface (API). We will also explore the Jenkins Command-line Interface (CLI), which offers a mechanism by which you can remotely interact with Jenkins programmatically and/or interactively.

Both these features are extremely powerful and are the fundamental utilities to extend Jenkins.

There are three main...