While this is awesome, Jenkins has a new way of visualizing pipelines, called Blue Ocean. We will install Blue Ocean from the plugin manager since it is packaged as a plugin.
Be sure to confirm that the version of Jenkins you are working with is compatible with Blue Ocean. Remember from our chapter on managing plugins that not all plugins are compatible with all versions of Jenkins. Blue Ocean plays well with newer versions of Jenkins in particular.
- On the Jenkins home dashboard, go to Manage Jenkins -> Manage Plugins. Under the Available tab, search for Blue Ocean.
- Select Blue Ocean and click Install without restart at the bottom of the page.
- On the installation page, select Restart Jenkins when installation is complete and no jobs are running.
While restarting Jenkins is not necessary, it is highly recommended. Some plugins might misbehave when installed without a restart. In order to avoid this, restart Jenkins when you install a plugin, but do this during scheduled maintenance periods or select the option on Jenkins to wait for running builds to complete before performing a restart. You can also restart Jenkins using http://<base_url>/safeRestart.
- After successfully installing and restarting Jenkins, when we go back to the Jenkins main dashboard, we see that a new item has been added to our configuration panel on the left, called Open Blue Ocean.
The Blue Ocean dashboard will display your project on your Jenkins server. We will focus on the project we just created in this chapter. In this case, it is called lesson5-pipeline and its dashboard is depicted in the following screenshot:
- Select the latest build, which in this case is build 2. We can also see the pipeline view in an intuitive way, as follows:
Selecting any stage reveals the steps that ran under each of them. We can also view the console output easily by selecting a stage and then clicking the drop-down next to each command run at that stage.