End of life operating systems

Mark Waite May 30, 2023

Beginning with Jenkins 2.407, May 30, 2023 and Jenkins 2.401.2, June 28, 2023, Jenkins administrators will be warned if they are running Jenkins on an operating system that is within 6 months of its end of life date.

The warning includes the date when Jenkins will no longer be supported on that operating system version. It advises the administrator to upgrade to a newer version of the operating system.

Our Linux support policy states that the Jenkins project does not support, test, or accept pull requests for operating systems that are no longer supported by their provider.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and derivatives

Red Hat maintains Red Hat Enterprise Linux in accordance with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 was initially released in 2014. It has been a very popular operating system thanks to its stability and long support life. That support life ends on June 30, 2024. A Red Hat blog post provides more details on the upcoming end of life.

Derivatives of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 like CentOS Linux 7, Scientific Linux 7, and Oracle Linux 7 will also no longer be supported after June 30, 2024. A CentOS project blog post shares their announcement of end of life.

The Jenkins project has decided to end its support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 in late 2023 rather than waiting until 2024. After Nov 16, 2023, the Jenkins project will no longer support running Jenkins on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 or its derivatives. Jenkins container images based on CentOS 7 will no longer be supported after Nov 16, 2023.

Users should replace their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 installations with another operating system. If they prefer to continue with Red Hat or one of its derivatives, they have many alternatives, including:

Fedora Linux 36

The Fedora project maintains releases of Fedora Linux according the their release life cycle. Fedora 36 reached end of life May 16, 2023.

Users should upgrade their Fedora Linux 36 to Fedora Linux 37 or Fedora Linux 38.

Ubuntu Linux 18.04

Canonical maintains Ubuntu Linux in accordance with the Ubuntu lifecycle and release cadence. Ubuntu 18.04 reaches its end of standard support on May 31, 2023. The Ubuntu blog shares more details of the end of life and alternatives for users.

Users should upgrade their Ubuntu Linux 18.04 to Ubuntu Linux 20.04 or Ubuntu Linux 22.04.

Alpine Linux 3.14

Alpine Linux 3.14 reached its end of support on May 1, 2023 The Alpine releases page describes their support policy.

Users should upgrade their Alpine Linux 3.14 to Alpine Linux 3.15, Alpine Linux 3.16, Alpine Linux 3.17, or Alpine Linux 3.18.

About the author

Mark Waite

Mark is a member of the Jenkins governing board, a long-time Jenkins user and contributor, a core maintainer, and maintainer of the git plugin, the git client plugin, the platform labeler plugin, the embeddable build status plugin, and several others. He is one of the authors of the "Improve a plugin" tutorial.

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