Visual Deployment with Jenkins Deploy Dashboard Plugin

The Deploy Dashboard plugin for Jenkins (available at https://plugins.jenkins.io/deploy-dashboard/) helps teams track which application versions are deployed to which environments, answering common questions like "Which version is currently in development?" or "Was a patch deployed to production yesterday?".

In agile development, frequent releases make it hard to keep track of deployments; the plugin consolidates deployment status into a single dashboard view.

Visualizing Deployments

The plugin provides a custom view that lists deployed versions per test and production environment, with clickable entries to view release history.

Getting Started: Adding a New Version to the Dashboard

Assuming you have a Jenkins job that builds and deploys your application, call the addDeployToDashboard method with the environment name and application version parameters.

properties([parameters([
    string(name: 'version', description: 'App version to deploy'),
    choice(
        name: 'env',
        choices: ['dev', 'prod'],
        description: 'Environment where the app should be deployed'
    )
])])
node {
    // ...
    stage("Deploy") {
        // Deploy app version ${params.version} to ${params.env} env
        // add release information to the dashboard
        addDeployToDashboard(
            env: params.env,
            buildNumber: params.version
        )
    }
}

Creating the Dashboard View

On the Jenkins home or folder page, click the "+" tab to start the new view wizard, name the view, select "Deploy View" type, and optionally use a regular expression (e.g., .*) to include jobs.

Adding Deployment Buttons to Your Versions

The plugin also allows adding custom buttons to the build sidebar via the buildAddUrl method, enabling quick deployment of a specific version to chosen environments.

node {
    stage("Build") {
        String builtVersion = "v2.7.5"
        // Build app with ${builtVersion} version
        // Add buttons to the left sidebar
        buildAddUrl(title: 'Deploy to DEV', url: "/job/app-deploy/parambuild/?env=dev&version=${builtVersion}")
        buildAddUrl(title: 'Deploy to PROD', url: "/job/app-deploy/parambuild/?env=prod&version=${builtVersion}")
    }
}

Declarative Pipeline Example

pipeline {
    agent any
    parameters {
      choice choices: ['dev','prod'], description: '', name: 'env'
      string defaultValue: '', description: '', name: 'version', trim: false
    }
    stages {
        stage('Hello') {
            steps {
                script {
                   addDeployToDashboard(
                        env: params.env,
                        buildNumber: params.version
                    )
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

These features help quality‑assurance teams quickly deploy any existing version to the desired environment, improving the overall Jenkins experience.