Developer Guides

Getting Started

Reference

  1. Architecture  
  2. Initialization and Startup  
  3. Extensibility  
  4. Model  
  5. Handling Requests  
  6. Security  
  7. Persistence  
  8. Scheduling  
  9. Views  
  10. Forms  
  11. Internationalization and Localization  
  12. Distributed Builds  
  13. Jenkins CLI  
  14. Testing  
  15. Plugin development  
  16. Appendix A: Building and Debugging Jenkins  
  17. Appendix B: Setting up a Development Environment  
  18. Extending Blue Ocean  
  19. Appendix C: Index of All How-To Guides

Resources

Jenkins Javadoc
Other Javadoc
Taglib Documentation
Tools

Persistence

This section is a work in progress. Want to help? Check out the jenkinsci-docs mailing list. For other ways to contribute to the Jenkins project, see this page about participating and contributing.

Jenkins uses the file system to store its data. Directories are created inside $JENKINS_HOME in a way that models the object model structure. Some data, like console output, are stored just as plain text file, some are stored as Java property files. But the majority of the structured data, such as how a project is configured, or various records of the build, are persisted by using XStream.

This allows object state to be persisted relatively easily (including those from plugins), but one must pay attention to what’s serialized in XML, and take measures to preserve backward compatibility. For example, in various parts of Jenkins you see the transient keyword (which instructs XStream not to bind the field to XML), fields left strictly for backward compatibility, or re-construction of in-memory data structure after data is loaded.

References