The GitLab-pipeline Jenkins Plug-in is designed to allow Jenkins to act as a front-end dashboard for GitLab CI. GitLab has very limited dashboard capabilities and exposing GitLab CI pipelines to Jenkins allows the richness of the Jenkins dashboard world to be applied to GitLab CI projects.

The basis for this work is the External Monitor Job Type plug-in and their work is greatfully aknowledged.

Since Jenkins is open-source but GitLab CI is not, the design molds Jenkions around the GitLab concepts and it is worth indicating the mapping between a few of these.

• Data is HTTP POSTed from GitLab CI to Jenkins via the GitLab CI 'pipeline' webhook
• Jenkins exposes a known HTTP interface at http(s)://gitlab/pipeline
• A plug-in configuration option determines whether GitLab CI pipelines define themselves as jobs to Jenkins or whether this has to be done manually. The reason for this is that Jenkins job names need to be unique but Jenkins cannot stop GitLab CI from definining a pipeline with a name that clashes with an existing Jenkins job.
• GitLab CI pipeline events are POSTed to Jenkins which then creates 'runs' to track the active pipeline.
• Jenkins trackes runs using the GitLab CI checkin ID which is assumed to be unique.
• The following pipeline events are tracked
  • Pipeline creation (depending on configuration)
  • Run being started
  • Run ending.