For many of our projects the Jenkins continuous integration (CI) server is one important cornerstone. The well known “works on my machine” means nothing in our company. Only code in repositories and built, tested and packaged by our CI servers counts. In addition to building, testing, analyzing and packaging our projects we use CI jobs for deployment and supervision, too. In such jobs you often need some sort of credentials like username/password or public/private keys.
If you are using username/password they do not only appear in the job configuration but also in the console build logs. In most cases this is undesirable but luckily there is an easy way around it: using the Environment Injector Plugin.
In the plugin you can “inject passwords to the build as environment variables” for use in your commands and scripts.
The nice thing about this is that the passwords are not only masked in the job configuration (like above) but also in the console logs of the builds!
Another alternative doing mostly the same is the Credentials Binding Plugin.
There is a lot more to explore when it comes to authentication and credential management in Jenkins as you can define credentials at the global level, use public/private key pairs and ssh agents, connect to a LDAP database and much more. Just do not sit back and provide security related stuff plaintext in job configurations or your deployments scripts!
Schneide Blog 