KodeKloud Notes

Jenkins offers several project types—often called jobs—to automate build, test, and deployment workflows. The core project types available in a standard Jenkins installation (plus installed plugins) include:

Project Type	Description	Best Use Case
Freestyle Project	UI-driven configuration with build steps	Simple or one-off tasks
Pipeline Project	Declarative or scripted pipeline as code	Complex CI/CD workflows
Multibranch Pipeline	Automatic branch discovery and pipelines	GitFlow or feature-branch automation
Maven Project	Native Maven integration	Java projects managed by `pom.xml`
Multi-configuration Project	Matrix builds across multiple axes	Testing on different platforms/environments
Organization Folders	Scan and manage multiple repositories in an org	Large-scale, repo-per-project teams

The image shows different types of Jenkins projects, including Freestyle Project, Pipeline Project, Multibranch Pipeline, Maven Project, Multi-configuration Project, and Organization Folders, each represented by an icon.

Freestyle Project

A Freestyle Project is the most straightforward Jenkins job. You define each step through the Jenkins UI—from source checkout to testing, building artifacts, and deploying. While it’s quick to set up, it can become hard to maintain as your pipeline grows in complexity.

Typical Workflow

Checkout code from your version control system
Run unit tests and report results
Build a Docker image and push it to your registry
Deploy the application to a target environment

The image shows a setup screen for creating a "Freestyle Project" with a description of its features, alongside a flowchart illustrating a sequence of project tasks: cloning code, running tests, building, pushing, and deploying.

Warning

Freestyle projects store configuration in the Jenkins UI rather than as code. This can make versioning, sharing, and automated updates challenging.

Limitations of Freestyle Projects

Even though Freestyle Projects are easy to get started with, they have several drawbacks for modern CI/CD:

Linear workflow only (no built-in parallelism)
Configuration not stored in source control
Hard to manage and reuse across teams
Lacks conditional stages and advanced features
Cannot automatically resume after controller failure

The image lists five limitations of Freestyle Projects: limited workflow, non-code-based configuration, complexity challenges, limited functionality, and inability to resume after failure.

Because of these constraints, teams often choose Pipeline or Multibranch Pipeline projects, which define workflows as code and support branching strategies, parallelism, and better error recovery.

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