Building a GUI within Jenkins, with a plugin

[Gábor Csárdi]

Hi All,

I have a quick question about an internal plugin I am considering building.

I need a small GUI that connects to Jenkins, and a database as well, and then updates the database, potentially creates/builds Jenkins jobs, etc.

I could build it as a separate web-app in node.js or Python, but I would avoid additional software we need on our build server, if possible. So I am playing with the idea of building this as a Jenkins plugin, and put the database into the Jenkins directory tree, into a sqlite file. The plugin itself would define one or more new views, and the views altogether would constitute the web app.

Is this a good idea? I am (yet) not familiar with what plugins can do, so I cannot tell. Ideally, the plugin should be able to create and modify Jenkins jobs, but I don't want users to be able to do this manually. Is this possible?

If you think that this obviously won't work, please tell me.

Thank You,

Gabor