We manage, install and configure Jenkins as code, without clicking buttons. You can fully automate jenkins activity and setup, from install to job creation, execution, plugin updates, config changes validation etc. Of course only power users will fully use Jenkins power.

Jenkins isn’t really worth the hassle today in my opinion - there are a bunch of new build tools that solve the problem better without all the garbage that comes with it.

And they also look better.

For god’s sake, you could even use GitLab today. What does Jenkins give you? What is there to defend?

For complex pipelines and code reuse (plugins, pipeline libraries, scripting) between projects, Jenkins offers more features for power users, and its maturity has been proven while GitLab CI still suffers from his young age. Other examples with the Cons at the end of this article : https://medium.com/sv-blog/migrating-from-jenkins-to-gitlab-... and https://stackoverflow.com/a/37430097/2309958 (and I can probably find a lot more :-) )

It has a much bigger API than you'd expect, have you even tried to use it? :-)

Yeah. Can you create a user via the API?

First of all, Jenkins was created in 2005, when REST was barely past the stage of being a gleam in Roy Fielding's eye. Yet, almost from the start, almost every page had an API (you'd add /api after the URL for its corresponding HTML page). With XML, JSON and Python (!) formats, with built-in search and filtering.

Secondly, to your point, there you go: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17716242/creating-user-i... I'm pretty sure that the reason there is no REST API for it is because you're supposed to be using your favorite back-end (LDAP, AD, etc.), with which Jenkins can integrate.

It's quite disingenuous to complain about the Jenkins APIs, there are a lot of them. They're not perfect or designed necessarily like something you'd design in 2020, but they are there.

It is indeed also a pile of buttons.