Until now, Jenkins plugins written in Java or Groovy could only be built with Maven, using the maven-hpi-plugin to generate a proper manifest and archive which Jenkins can consume. But starting now, you can also use Gradle!

See the wiki for information on how you can use Gradle and the new gradle-jpi-plugin to build, test and release your Java or Groovy Jenkins plugin.

Over drinks this evening Kohsuke pointed out that he never saw a blog post about PagerDuty.

If you've never worked in a sysadmin role or in any other position that would require an on-call rotation, then you may have never seen PagerDuty.

In essence the service provides a great series of integration points with Pingdom or Nagios for handling monitoring. As an infrastructure guy (part time), I can honestly say it's a great tool and I'm grateful to PagerDuty for supporting Jenkins with our own account to help manage project infrastructure.

A couple weekends ago I finished setting up Nagios (read-only username/password: jenkins/jenkins) for critical project services which by itself is a good step forward. Combine that with PagerDuty's Nagios integration and a solid on-call rotation, and I'm more confident than I've ever been that Kohsuke or myself could actually take a vacation!

Check them out, and be sure to thank them on Twitter at @PagerDuty for supporting Jenkins!

Our earlier appeal for donation was a drastic boost to our fund-raising drive, (and looking at the twitter reactions, it feels like the Wikipedia parody we put on Jenkins on Jenkins helped spread the words — I guess jokes do work!

And I'm happy to report that we've successfully raised over $12000 as of today. That's more than enough to pay off all the current balance and it should keep the project going for quite a while. I've assembled the donor list in appreciation.

So once again, thanks everyone for their generous support!

I've just added three events coming up in the next few weeks to the Jenkins calendar. Conveniently, they are all events I'll be attending while traveling around Western Europe!

• The Cologne JUG is having a meetup on Saturday, June 25th, starting at 2pm. We'll be talking about Jenkins, maybe doing some coding, and then heading out for drinks and more talk! You can find more information and sign up at Xing.

• A few days later, TNG Technology Consulting is generously hosting a meetup in Munich, on Wednesday, June 30th, starting at 3pm. I'll be giving a quick talk on the state of the Jenkins project, followed by Ullrich Haffner (the author of the static analysis plugins for Jenkins) giving a quick talk on how those plugins are used. After that, we'll be having a hackathon, and then more beer! Again, you can find more information and sign up at Xing.

• A week later, the London CI meetup group is hosting a meetup as well, on Wednesday, July 6th, starting at 6:30pm. We'll be meeting up at the Royal Festival Hall for discussion and drinking. You can find more information and sign up at Meetup.

Do you have a Jenkins event you'd like to have added to our calendar? Let us know!

This post is long over-due and I really apologize for that.

Some months ago we put out the call for "more slave machines!" through the mailing lists, sky-writers and twitter. We had a serious problem, for a continuous integration project, a large number of our plugins and dependencies weren't being built in a continuous and automated fashion!

We had some builds on a couple of flakey machines on home connections contributed by various individuals, until Rackspace stepped up in a big way and donated an infrastructure server for the project to use.

For months now, just about all plugins and core have been built and tested on spinach, the always-on machine in the Rackspace Cloud. Dutifully chugging away building core, plugin after plugin and occasionally getting flooded with work from Frederic Camblor's plugin compatibility tester!

In hindsight, having a powerful infrastructure machine for nothing other than builds has helped us build great software faster; I can't imagine how difficult things might be otherwise.

I've personally had a lot of interaction with Rackspace engineers through the OpenStack project and have a number of friends who operate businesses on Rackspace/Rackspace Cloud hybrid infrastructures.

The folks at Rackspace are top notch and I can't thank them enough for contributing to the Jenkins project.