{"slug": "jenkins", "name": "Jenkins", "category": "infra", "category_name": "Infrastructure and DevOps", "description": "", "recommenders": 1, "commenters": 9, "warners": 2, "score": 0.76, "rising": 1.0, "first": "2025-12-01", "latest": "2026-08-27", "why": "I\u2019m intensely grateful that despite rumblings, the company I contract to hasn\u2019t switched from self-hosted Jenkins to GHA.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 4, "compare": 2, "warn": 2}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0], "listed": false, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I\u2019m intensely grateful that despite rumblings, the company I contract to hasn\u2019t switched from self-hosted Jenkins to GHA.", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Jenkins"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 787268752, "item_id": 49204297, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204297", "by": "macintux", "date": "2026-08-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019m intensely grateful that despite rumblings, the company I contract to hasn\u2019t switched from self-hosted Jenkins to GHA.", "excerpt": "I\u2019m intensely grateful that despite rumblings, the company I contract to hasn\u2019t switched from self-hosted Jenkins to GHA. Hopefully the steady drumbeat of failure will keep it that way.", "context": "contractor", "use_case": "self-hosted CI", "switched_from": "", "story": "GitHub Is Experiencing Difficulties"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 750548386, "item_id": 46909274, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46909274", "by": "habosa", "date": "2026-02-05", "stance": "warn", "quote": "GitHub Actions is the worst CI tool I\u2019ve ever used (maybe tied with Jenkins)", "excerpt": "Dead on. GitHub Actions is the worst CI tool I\u2019ve ever used (maybe tied with Jenkins) and Buildkite is the best. Buildkite\u2019s dynamic pipelines (the last item in the post) are so amazingly useful you\u2019ll wonder how you ever did without them. You can do super cool things like have your unit test step spawn a test de-flaking step only if a test fails. Or control test parallelism based on the code changes you\u2019re testing. ", "context": "", "use_case": "CI", "switched_from": "", "story": "GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team"}, {"id": 737736001, "item_id": 46108500, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46108500", "by": "paulddraper", "date": "2025-12-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "But Jenkins and its own quirks", "excerpt": "This is documented currently (supposed to be 14 days). [1] That said, I have found runners to be unnecessarily difficult. But Jenkins and its own quirks, and when I used GitLab, it used ancient docker-machine and outdated AMIs by default. I think Buildkite has been the only one to make this easy and scalable. But it is meant for self hosted runners. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/actions/how-t", "context": "", "use_case": "CI", "switched_from": "", "story": "Advent of Sysadmin 2025"}]}], "who": [{"by": "nightpool", "context": "former part-time Jenkins admin", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471012", "date": "2026-08-27"}, {"by": "macintux", "context": "contractor", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204297", "date": "2026-08-06"}, {"by": "annzabelle", "context": "moved to New Zealand from the US", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176935", "date": "2026-08-04"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["ci", "ci administration", "ci/cd", "ci pipelines", "self-hosted ci", "deploying to aws"], "compared": [{"slug": "github-actions", "name": "GitHub Actions", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "gitlab", "name": "GitLab", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "gitlab-ci", "name": "GitLab CI", "co": 1, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "buildkite", "name": "Buildkite", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "circleci", "name": "CircleCI", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49331033", "title": "Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46908491", "title": "GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49454728", "title": "GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49199094", "title": "GitHub Is Experiencing Difficulties", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49167448", "title": "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46586385", "title": "Fossil versus Git", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"warn": 1}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {"warn": 1, "compare": 1}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 3, "recommend": 1, "compare": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 791536194, "item_id": 49471012, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471012", "by": "nightpool", "date": "2026-08-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I was actually a part-time Jenkins admin back in high school and college.", "excerpt": "Yes, I was actually a part-time Jenkins admin back in high school and college. I use CircleCI more than Actions most of the time (and used Travis before that), especially for higher cost workflows, but there's no beating Actions in terms of its ease of setup and ecosystem advantage. It's way easier to just set up a simple JS file that runs on every commit in Actions compared to anywhere else. Would be happy to be pro", "context": "former part-time Jenkins admin", "use_case": "CI administration", "switched_from": "", "story": "GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?"}, {"id": 789467425, "item_id": 49341714, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49341714", "by": "adityaathalye", "date": "2026-08-17", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "one giant in-house box running Jenkins", "excerpt": "Old skool is best skool... There is wisdom in keeping these decoupled: - 1. your central code review (and hosting), which is the critical choke-point on team collaboration. versus - 2. the ever-expanding ick of testing, building, deploying it etc... because failure modes of software construction infra are concentrated here. --- 1. Code review (and hosting): Keep this in-house always. Use Gerrit if you care about code", "context": "", "use_case": "CI/CD", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub"}, {"id": 789409362, "item_id": 49338085, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338085", "by": "esseph", "date": "2026-08-17", "stance": "compare", "quote": "you will be just fine in GitLab, CircleCI, Jenkins", "excerpt": "Pipelines are not magic. You want a couple of primitives in there, variable substitution, maybe lite secret management. Depending on the type and languages you work across they could also be 100% unique to each company, language, project, and industry. LLMs have also further made pipeline creation pretty trivial. If you can use or make a GitHub action you will be just fine in GitLab, CircleCI, Jenkins, or a couple of", "context": "", "use_case": "CI pipelines", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub"}, {"id": 787268752, "item_id": 49204297, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204297", "by": "macintux", "date": "2026-08-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019m intensely grateful that despite rumblings, the company I contract to hasn\u2019t switched from self-hosted Jenkins to GHA.", "excerpt": "I\u2019m intensely grateful that despite rumblings, the company I contract to hasn\u2019t switched from self-hosted Jenkins to GHA. Hopefully the steady drumbeat of failure will keep it that way.", "context": "contractor", "use_case": "self-hosted CI", "switched_from": "", "story": "GitHub Is Experiencing Difficulties"}, {"id": 786830960, "item_id": 49176935, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176935", "by": "annzabelle", "date": "2026-08-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I've always deployed to AWS via Jenkins", "excerpt": "I moved to New Zealand from the US recently, and the tech industry here is mostly on .NET and Azure. My coworkers keep looking at me like I'm a moron because I've always deployed to AWS via Jenkins and don't know their weird homebrew system to deploy things to our on prem windows servers.", "context": "moved to New Zealand from the US", "use_case": "deploying to AWS", "switched_from": "", "story": "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"}, {"id": 750557728, "item_id": 46909858, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46909858", "by": "deng", "date": "2026-02-05", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Jenkins was and probably still is horrible. I don't want to go back. However, it had some pretty good features I still miss", "excerpt": "The log viewer thing is what baffles me most. Back in... I don't know, 2010, we used Jenkins. Yes, that Java thingy. It was kind of terrible (like every CI), but it had a \"Warnings Plugin\". It parsed the log output with regular expressions and presented new warnings and errors in a nice table. You could click on them and it would jump to the source. You could configure your own regular expressions (yes, then you have", "context": "", "use_case": "CI", "switched_from": "", "story": "GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team"}, {"id": 750548386, "item_id": 46909274, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46909274", "by": "habosa", "date": "2026-02-05", "stance": "warn", "quote": "GitHub Actions is the worst CI tool I\u2019ve ever used (maybe tied with Jenkins)", "excerpt": "Dead on. GitHub Actions is the worst CI tool I\u2019ve ever used (maybe tied with Jenkins) and Buildkite is the best. Buildkite\u2019s dynamic pipelines (the last item in the post) are so amazingly useful you\u2019ll wonder how you ever did without them. You can do super cool things like have your unit test step spawn a test de-flaking step only if a test fails. Or control test parallelism based on the code changes you\u2019re testing. ", "context": "", "use_case": "CI", "switched_from": "", "story": "GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team"}, {"id": 745402451, "item_id": 46587653, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46587653", "by": "shane_kerns", "date": "2026-01-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "we use jenkins at work", "excerpt": "The infrastructure around fossil and jujitsu are missing. Git isn't the best but network effects matter. For example, we use jenkins at work and there is no plugin for fossil or jujitsu. Every customer we have uses git so we can't even propose fossil. Even though we might use only 10 git commands, those commands are universally known by all to work if something goes wrong. It isn't sufficient to say that fossil or ju", "context": "", "use_case": "CI at work", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fossil versus Git"}, {"id": 737736001, "item_id": 46108500, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46108500", "by": "paulddraper", "date": "2025-12-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "But Jenkins and its own quirks", "excerpt": "This is documented currently (supposed to be 14 days). [1] That said, I have found runners to be unnecessarily difficult. But Jenkins and its own quirks, and when I used GitLab, it used ancient docker-machine and outdated AMIs by default. I think Buildkite has been the only one to make this easy and scalable. But it is meant for self hosted runners. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/actions/how-t", "context": "", "use_case": "CI", "switched_from": "", "story": "Advent of Sysadmin 2025"}]}