Job DSL Plugin Vs Pipeline Plugin
What is the major difference between Job DSL Plugin and Pipeline Plugin
- both provide way to programmatic job creation
- which is the best to use as moving ahead and why?
- if both have similar functionality, do they have different use cases?
- Since Jenkins 2.0 is focusing on Pipelines as code, does this mean that job-dsl does not have a future or Pipeline Plugin is the next step in the Job DSL Plugin?
Answer
I have extensive experience with both. A concise reply is that Job DSL has existed for much longer and was Netflix's open source solution for "coding" Jenkins. It allowed you to introduce logic and variables into scripting your Jenkins jobs and typically one would use these jobs to form some sort of "pipeline" for a particular project. This plugin received quite a bit of traction as a common way to enable job templating and scripting.
Jenkins Pipeline (2.0) is a new incarnation of a Jenkins job that is entirely based on a DSL and attempts to eliminate the need to stitch together multiple jobs to fill a single pipeline which was by far the most common use of Job DSL. Originally, with Pipeline DSL not offering many of the features that Job DSL did, and as mentioned above Job DSL would allow you to create Pipeline jobs, they could be used together to define a pipeline.
Today, IMO there is little reason to use Job DSL because Pipeline is the Jenkins-supported mechanism for scripting Jenkins pipelines and it has met or surpassed much of the functionality of Job DSL. New plugins are being developed natively for Pipeline, and those that don't are being encouraged by Jenkins developers to integrate with Pipeline. And Pipeline has several advantages:
- There is no need to "seed" jobs using Pipeline as there is with Job DSL since the Pipeline is the job itself. With Job DSL, it's just a script that creates other jobs.
- With Pipeline, you have features such as a parameterized manual input step, allowing you specify logic midstream within the pipeline
- The logic that can be included in a Job DSL is limited to creating the jobs themselves; whereas with Pipeline you can include logic directly inside the job.
- Job DSL is simply much more difficult to create a basic delivery pipeline using, for example, the Build Pipeline Plugin; using Pipeline your file will be smaller and syntax shorter. And if you're using Job DSL to create Pipeline jobs, I haven't seen a major value for that anymore given the templating features available out-of-the-box with Jenkins Pipeline.
Finally, Jenkins Pipeline is by far the most prevalent feature of Jenkins right now. Check out the Jenkins World 2016 agenda and you'll see approx. 50% of the sessions involve pipeline. None for Job DSL.