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Jenkins X: New UI to visualize your pipelines and logs

By November 10, 2020November 1st, 2023Blog, Project

Contributed by Vincent Behar

Originally published on jenkins-x.io

Welcome to the Jenkins X Pipelines Visualizer: a new open-source read-only UI for Jenkins X, with a very specific goal and scope: visualize the pipelines and logs.

This project was started at Dailymotion and quickly shared with the Jenkins X community.

Why a new UI?

There is already the Octant-based UI, so why a new UI?

The main reason is that Octant â€œis an application and is intended as a single client tool and at this time there are no plans to support hosted versions of Octant” – see this thread on the Octant GitHub repository for more information and details.

So while Octant answers to a lot of use-cases, there is one for which it is not suited: quickly printing the build logs on a browser, for a specific pipeline. We want to be able to click on a link from a Pull/Merge Request and get the pipeline logs. This is the specific use-case covered by the Pipelines Visualizer.

Features

We want to keep it small, focused, and fast. It’s a read-only UI, so there won’t be “actions” to trigger a pipeline – because it can already be done using “chatops” commands in the Pull Request for example.

But there are a few interesting features already:

  • first, it’s very fast to get the logs. Much faster than the old JXUI.
  • it can retrieve the logs from pipelines that have been garbage-collected – if you configure the URL of the buckets where the logs are stored.
  • it has URLs compatible with the old JXUI – so it’s very easy to replace the old JXUI with this new UI and keep all the links working.

Roadmap

This project was shared very early with the community, after just a few hours of work. So our short-term goal is to improve the UI – make it beautiful.

Demo

We did a demo of jx-pipelines-visualizer at the last office hours:

Next steps

Check out the jx-pipelines-visualizer GitHub repository if you want to install it in your cluster – there is a Helm Chart which can be added to your Jenkins X Dev Environment.

And any contributions are welcomed – either create an issue or pull request in the project’s GitHub repository, or come in the #jenkins-x-dev Slack Channel.

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