Last week, I have found myself tinkering with Jenkins again because of several reasons. I wanted to schedule the Cucumber–Watir functional checks I’ve written in the past two months so I don’t have to run them every time in the terminal. I also wanted to have a record of the results of the latest checks so I can look back at them when I need to. More importantly, I wanted a place where anyone from the team can view the said checks and see if our Staging environment is stable or not according to the smoke tests.

Of course, I also wanted this place to be somewhat nice-looking, which the default Jenkins page somewhat lacks.

And this is what I ended up with. 🙂

And here are the tweaks I did to make the Jenkins user interface a little better:

• Use the Jenkins Material Theme to set the theme of Jenkins to look like Google’s material design. To do this:
  • Download the Jenkins Simple Theme Plugin
  • Install the downloaded plugin to Jenkins (Manage Jenkins -> Manage Plugins -> Advanced -> Upload plugin)
  • Choose a desired color from their existing theme and complete the URL of the theme CSS, for example https://jenkins-contrib-themes.github.io/jenkins-material-theme/dist/material-teal.css. Replace the word teal with a color of your choice.
  • Copy the URL
  • Back in Jenkins, go to Manage Jenkins -> Configure System -> Theme
  • Paste the URL that you copied as the value of URL of theme CSS
  • Click Save

Upload a Jenkins Plugin

Set the Jenkins CSS theme to Material

• Update jenkins.xml to support CSS when viewing HTML reports uploaded by post-build actions like the HTML Publisher Plugin, because Jenkins’ content security policy does not support it out of the box
  • Go to the Jenkins installation directory, and look for the jenkins.xml file
  • Open the file in a text editor
  • Add the “-Dhudson.model.DirectoryBrowserSupport.CSP= “ command to the jenkins.xml arguments
  • Save the file

Update jenkins.xml to allow CSS content

• Allow HTML content in views and jobs descriptions. To do this:
  • Go to Manage Jenkins -> Configure Global Security
  • In the Markup Formatter field, select Raw HTML or Safe HTML
  • Click Save

Set View and Job descriptions to display HTML content

• Use the Ansicolor Plugin to properly display colors in the job’s console output. To do this:
  • Download the Ansicolor Plugin
  • Install the downloaded plugin to Jenkins (Manage Jenkins -> Manage Plugins -> Advanced -> Upload plugin)
  • Configure the desired job’s Build Environment to use the Color ANSI Console Output

Set a desired Jenkins job to use colored outputs in the console

Sample Jenkins colored console output