Sidebar Links in Jenkins Job

Hello Everyone! Here I will give some real use cases where the Jenkins integration with Sidebar Links requirement for a Jenkins Project. 

Case 1: Your project might have a complete build strategy defined and it is shared on a Confluence page or common documentation platform. This document need to be linked to the Jenkins Job.

Case 2: Your QA team want to have all the jobs which they want to access on a single page. Even though you have placed all the QA-related jobs into a View. The solution is using Sidebar Link to the View from the Job.

Case 3: A QA team working on two different Product testings where you have the two separate Jobs, but in the Organization the jobs are grown where a listing of all jobs will make difficult to search for the second job. instead of searching for the second job if we have the second job on the first job page then QA team life will be easy. 

How to use Sidebar Links in a Jenkins Job?

Sidebar link can be used for linking following:

1. Documentation or External URLs
2. Jenkins Views
3. Jenkins Jobs

 Add links in the sidebar of the Jenkins main page, view tabs and project pages. 

This simple plugin adds an Additional Sidebar Links section in the main Jenkins configuration page, with settings for link URLs, texts, and icons. 

Step 1 Install the Sidebar Link plugin

Login to Jenkins console, Select Manage Jenkins> Manage Plugins

Click on 'Available Plugins', Filter by searching 'Sidebar' word. Select the check box against it and the 'Install Plugin without restart' button.

Jenkins Plugin manager install plugin - Sidebar Link

Step 2: Goto your target project(new item or existing project) where you need the Sidebar link. in the 'General' tab you can see that 'Sidebar Link'. 

Setting Sidebar Links with detailed steps

Select the appropriate icon for your sidebar link, On your $JENKINS_HOME you can find in 'images/24x24' directory that contains many icon files for example you use help.gif, document.gif refresh.gif. Else you can also for a custom icon placed in the JENKINS_HOME/userContent directory.

Sidebar Link - icon setup options

Finally, you will see the sidebar link with the selective icons. When I've clicked on 'DevOps Hunter' Sidebar Links surprise it opened this post Wow!! Wonderful!! this post enables you 'Continous Learning' of Jenkins CI one more interesting step in learners path..