LTS vs Weekly

LTS Versus Weekly Release Lines

Jenkins 8,793 has two release lines. The weekly line ships every week from the main branch; the LTS (long-term support) line takes one recent weekly as a baseline every 12 weeks and publishes three point releases four weeks apart, .1, .2 and .3, containing only small, safe backported fixes and security patches.

The two Jenkins release lines
LTS Weekly
Current version (25 Sep 2026) 2.568.3 (2 Sep 2026) 2.583 (21 Sep 2026)
Cadence New baseline every 12 weeks, fixes every 4 Every week
Docker 514 tags lts, lts-jdk21, 2.568.3-lts-jdk21 latest, jdk21, 2.583-jdk21
Use it for Production controllers Trying features, plugin development

A moving tag such as lts-jdk21 is convenient for a first run, but a controller should be recreated from a pinned tag so that a routine docker pull never upgrades it by surprise. Both tags point at the same image today:

Pinning the exact LTS releaseShell
docker pull -q jenkins/jenkins:2.568.3-lts-jdk21
docker image ls --digests jenkins/jenkins --format '{{.Tag}} {{.Digest}}'
Output
docker.io/jenkins/jenkins:2.568.3-lts-jdk21
2.568.3-lts-jdk21 sha256:c1e4c349365f6d16d88595b2c5f7e8ff39b8ae1d061f62420bac193b4b9616d0
lts-jdk21 sha256:c1e4c349365f6d16d88595b2c5f7e8ff39b8ae1d061f62420bac193b4b9616d0

Security fixes reach both lines on the same day: the advisory of 2 September 2026 was fixed in weekly 2.580 and LTS 2.568.3. The next LTS baseline is due around the end of September 2026; LTS Upgrades shows how to move between baselines.