Making your plugins discoverable with labels and GitHub topics

[Oleg Nenashev]

Hi all,

Plugin labels are displayed on the plugin site (e.g. see https://plugins.jenkins.io/git/) and can be used for the plugin search: (github-related plugins or kubernetes). So setting labels can help to make your plugins more discoverable for users. Later we ccould also use labels to highlight plugins in the plugin site (e.g. tag cloud), Jenkins plugin manager and the installation wizard.  

We used to manage labels from Wiki, and then switched to the label definitions file in the Update Center repository. Both approaches were quite difficult to manage, and usage of labels in Jenkins was quite low. Many top-installed plugins did not have labels at all. Thanks to the work by Gavin Mogan, Jenkins update center now supports retrieving plugin labels from GitHub topics.So any maintainer can now easily manage labels via GitHub, and they will be synchronized to the plugin site.

Example:

How to set up topics for your plugins?

• Go to your plugin repository, click the "Manage topics" link. You should have Manage/Administer permissions to do so, but this is what we grant to maintainer teams by default
• Set relevant GitHub topics
• GitHub suggests some topics based on the repo name, summary and the technologies used
• You can create your own topics if needed
• Check out the labels whitelist in  /jenkins-infra/update-center2.../allowed-labels.properties, 
• You can suggest new labels using pull requests if needed
• "jenkins-" prefix in GitHub topics is automatically truncated

Best known practices

Right now we do not have documentation about labeling best practices. I believe we can figure it out as we go, Documentation SIG channels could be used for such topics. E.g. see this initial discussion with Mark Waite.

Best regards,

Oleg Nenashev