Retiring Plugins

Retiring Plugins

Auditing and Retiring Unused Plugins

Plugins accumulate: an experiment ends and its plugin stays, still receiving advisories. An audit starts with the plugins nothing else depends on, the only ones you can remove alone, then asks whether any job uses them:

Listing top-level pluginsGroovy

J=http://localhost:32080; AUTH="admin:$JENKINS_TOKEN"
curl -sg -u "$AUTH" -o deps.json \
  "$J/pluginManager/api/json?depth=2&tree=plugins[shortName,dependencies[shortName]]"
jq -r '[.plugins[].dependencies[].shortName] as $needed | .plugins[].shortName
  | select(. as $p | $needed | index($p) | not)' deps.json | sort | paste -sd' ' | fold -sw 90

Output

ant build-timeout dark-theme email-ext github-checks gradle ldap matrix-auth 
pipeline-github-lib pipeline-graph-view ssh-slaves timestamper workflow-aggregator 
ws-cleanup

A grep for plugin=" across jobs/*/config.xml finds what jobs use; steps inside Pipeline scripts, such as cleanWs(), need a search of the Jenkinsfiles. No job used Ant or Gradle 19,597 , so both went:

Uninstalling two plugins, then restarting when the queue is idleGroovy

for p in ant gradle; do
  curl -s -u "$AUTH" -X POST "$J/manage/pluginManager/plugin/$p/doUninstall"; done
curl -s -u "$AUTH" -X POST "$J/safeRestart"; sleep 60
curl -sg -u "$AUTH" "$J/pluginManager/api/json?tree=plugins[shortName]" | jq '.plugins | length'

Output

Uninstalling deletes the .jpi; settings it wrote stay until Manage Jenkins 8,793 > Manage Old Data purges them. When unsure, disable instead, which keeps the files. Also watch the update center's deprecations (267 on 25 September 2026, none installed here) and low health scores (the lowest here, 80, were dependencies).

MENU