My company has asked me to learn Jenkins, and I'm looking for good tutorials, documentation, or video playlists to get started. I'd like to reach the point where I can create and maintain basic CI/CD pipelines. For someone new to DevOps, how long would that typically take, and what should I practice along the way?
3 Answers
If you’re also expected to administer Jenkins, treat security and maintenance as a separate learning track. You’ll need to understand plugin updates, access control, credentials management, agent isolation, backups, and patching. Creating a basic pipeline is relatively quick, but safely running a production Jenkins installation requires considerably more experience. Practice in a disposable local environment before changing the company instance.
Start with the official Jenkins documentation and build a small lab on your laptop using a local container or lightweight Kubernetes setup. Learn the basics of agents, jobs, pipelines, Jenkinsfiles, credentials, plugins, and integrating with your source-control system. You’ll learn much faster by creating a pipeline that checks out code, runs tests, builds an artifact, and publishes the result than by only watching videos. With some general programming and Git experience, the basics could take a few days to a couple of weeks; becoming comfortable operating Jenkins takes longer.
It’s worth asking whether Jenkins is required for a specific reason. GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Azure DevOps, and similar tools are often simpler when your code already lives on those platforms. They usually provide tighter integration, less server and plugin maintenance, and easier hosted runners. That said, Jenkins is still widely used, especially in organizations that need a self-hosted and highly customizable automation server, so learning it is still practical if your company relies on it.
Jenkins may feel older compared with newer integrated platforms, but it hasn’t disappeared. Its ability to run on your own infrastructure and support many kinds of agents and integrations is still valuable in some environments.
The official docs are useful, but I’d pair them with a hands-on video course because Jenkins has a lot of concepts that are easier to understand in a working example.