We announced in January that Jenkins would be upgrading its Java runtime dependency to Java 8 this year. After a sizable amount of preparation, this week’s release of Jenkins 2.54 is the first weekly release to require a Java 8 runtime. For users of the weekly release, this means that Jenkins 2.54 must have a Java 8 runtime installed on the system in order to run. Those using the jenkinsci/jenkins:latest Docker container won’t...

In the next few months, Jenkins will require Java 8 as its runtime. Back in last November, we discussed interesting statistics showing that Jenkins was now running Java 8 on a majority of its running instances. Timeline Here is how we plan to roll that baseline upgrade in the next few months. Now: Announce the intention publicly. April, 2017: Drop support for Java 7 in Jenkins weekly. With the current rhythm, that means...