I am currently managing a Jenkins instance with multiple teams and I need to restrict user access so that Team A can only view and build their own jobs, while Team B remains restricted to their specific folder. Currently, my settings seem to be global, which is a huge security risk. Is there a specific plugin or a native configuration that allows me to define permissions at the individual project level rather than globally?
3 answers
To achieve granular control, the industry standard is the Role-based Authorization Strategy plugin. Once installed, you can navigate to "Manage and Assign Roles." Here, you can create "Project roles" using regular expressions to match job names. For instance, a role named "TeamA_Dev" could have a pattern like TeamA_.*. This allows you to assign specific permissions—like Read, Build, or Cancel—only to jobs that match that naming convention. This is much more scalable than manually editing every single job's security settings and ensures that new jobs following the naming pattern automatically inherit the correct security restrictions.
Does using the Role-based Strategy plugin cause any significant performance degradation on the Jenkins controller if we have hundreds of different roles and thousands of jobs?
You can also enable "Project-based Matrix Authorization Strategy" in the Global Security settings. This adds a "Enable project-based security" checkbox directly inside the configuration page of every single job.
I agree with Sarah that the Matrix Strategy is the most direct way for small teams. I used it last year on a project with only five jobs, and it was much faster to set up than the Role-based plugin. Just be careful, because if you forget to give yourself "Admin" rights within that specific job matrix, you might accidentally lock yourself out of editing it!
Michael, while there is a slight overhead because Jenkins has to evaluate the regex patterns for each job rendering in the UI, it's generally negligible for most mid-sized setups. However, for massive enterprise instances with thousands of jobs, it is recommended to keep your regex patterns simple. Using Folders along with the "Folder-level Authorization" can also be a more performant alternative as it reduces the complexity of the permission checking logic during the page load.