It is a server-based system that runs in servlet containers such as Apache Tomcat, or by default as a stand-alone web-application in co-bundled Eclipse Jetty.

It supports version control tools, including AccuRev, CVS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Perforce, ClearCase, and RTC, and can execute Apache Ant, Apache Maven, and sbt based projects as well as arbitrary shell scripts and Windows batch commands.

As a result, on January 11, 2011, a call for votes was made to change the project name from "Hudson" to "Jenkins."

[12] On February 1, 2011, Oracle said that they intended to continue development of Hudson, and considered Jenkins a fork rather than a rename.

[15] In 2011, creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi received an O'Reilly Open Source Award for his work on the Hudson/Jenkins project.

[8] In March 2018 Jenkins X software project for Kubernetes was publicly presented,[18] with support for different cloud providers including AWS EKS among others.

[19] Builds can be triggered by various means, for example: Plugins have been released for Jenkins that extend its use to projects written in languages other than Java.

[27] Jenkins can be used to schedule and monitor the running of a shell script via user interface instead of command prompt.