Live Wall

A Jenkins view that turns your jobs into a wall of big coloured tiles, built for the television in the corner of the office.

Hexagons interlocked into a honeycomb. Jobs building right now sort to the top left, and the striped fill means Jenkins has no duration estimate to draw a progress bar from yet.

See it running

A minute and a half against a real controller: the shape, animation, palette and ordering all changed on a live wall, then the kiosk page a television would be pointed at.

Played here at four times speed. Watch the full demo at normal speed.

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Why

Inspired by the excellent Build Monitor plugin, which pioneered the idea. Live Wall is a rethink of the same idea for one specific situation: a large screen that nobody is standing next to.

That leads to three promises, and they are the whole design.

Everything fits

There is no pagination, and there never will be. Tiles are measured against your actual screen and scaled so that every job in the view is visible at the same time. A job you can only see half the time is a job nobody sees.

Colour carries the message

A tile has a job name and a colour. That is it. No commit messages, no durations, no avatars — at four metres you cannot read them anyway, and they cost the space the job name needs.

The palettes are fully saturated rather than pastel, and the text colour on each tile is chosen from the measured contrast ratio against its fill, so it stays legible whatever colours you pick — including ones you invent.

Motion means something

A building job fills up in step with its estimated duration, and falls back to indeterminate stripes the moment it overruns that estimate. The animation never lies about how far along a build is.

The same jobs as rounded rectangles. Ten shapes, six palettes, and an adjustable gap — the default is zero, so the tiles meet and the wall reads as one surface.

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Quick start

1. Manage Jenkins → Plugins → Available plugins, search for Live Wall, and install it.
2. New View → name it → Live Wall, then pick your jobs the way you always do.
3. Point the television at …/view/<name>/wall — the kiosk page, with no Jenkins chrome on it at all. The Full screen button on the view page does the same for a browser you are already sitting in front of.

That is the whole setup. Everything else is optional, and every default is chosen to be the one you would have picked.

Requires Jenkins 2.555.3 or newer, running on Java 21 or newer. Java 21 is a requirement of Jenkins itself at this version, not of this plugin — core 2.555.3 is compiled to Java 21 bytecode, so a Java 17 controller cannot run that Jenkins at all, with or without Live Wall.

Prefer to build it yourself, or want a throwaway Jenkins to try it on rather than your own? docs/building.md covers building and installing from source, and docs/demo.md starts a disposable controller with the plugin and a spread of sample jobs in one command.

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What you can change

Palettes	Vivid · Neon · High contrast · Daylight · Colour-blind safe · Midnight, plus per-colour overrides on top of any of them
Shapes	Rectangle · Rounded · Square · Circle · Octagon · Hexagon · Diamond · Parallelogram · Chevron · Cross
Animations	Progress fill · Sweep · Stripes · Pulse · None
Contents	All jobs, or only problems — an alert board where an empty screen means everything is fine
Order	Running first (default) · Failed first · Passing first · Name (nothing ever moves) · Most recent · View order
Which jobs	Tick them in the job picker, or filter by name with ci-*, *-pipeline or just drools — wildcards and plain words, no regular expressions
Labels	Folder paths on or off, and a regex to strip the noise: ^ci-|-pipeline$ turns ci-decision-control-pipeline into decision-control, and lets it be drawn twice as large
Packing	Interlocked by default, so hexagons tessellate into a honeycomb and diamonds into a lattice, with an adjustable gap (0 by default) and a hairline separator that keeps touching tiles countable
Sizing	Fit everything on one screen, or hold a readable size and scroll continuously
Panel care	Optional slow drift to protect OLED and plasma screens from burn-in

Try any of it without saving by putting it in the URL — handy for a screen you cannot comfortably type on:

…/view/pipelines/wall?palette=neon&shape=octagon&refresh=10&header=0

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗