In Jenkins, credentials are a set of information used for authentication with internal/external services to accomplish an action. Jenkins credentials are provisioned & managed by a built-in plugin called – Credentials Binding – plugin. Jenkins can handle different credentials as follows –
- Secret text – A token such as an API token, JSON token, etc.
- Username and password – Basic Authentication can be stored as a credential as well.
- Secret file – A secret file used to authenticate some secure data services & security handshakes.
- SSH Username with a private key – An SSH public/private key pair for Machine to Machine authentication.
- Certificate – a PKCS#12 certificate file and an optional password.
- Docker Host Certificate Authentication credentials.
- And as we can guess, this can be extended to several other extensible credential types like – AWS credential, Azure secrets, etc. using commonly available plugins.
