Accelerating Jenkins Plugin Downloads with the TUNA Mirror and Update‑Center Configuration

Jenkins' community network infrastructure is hosted on overseas servers and lacks CDN or load‑balancing configurations within China. As a result, many Chinese users experience very slow or timed‑out plugin downloads despite the availability of over 1,500 plugins.

Programmers, being naturally lazy, want to obtain plugins quickly without waiting for data packets from the United States. After some research, the author discovered that the Tsinghua University Open Source Software Mirror (TUNA) provides a mirror service for Jenkins:

https://mirrors.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/jenkins/

However, simply changing the Update Center URL in Jenkins' plugin manager to the TUNA address did not fully resolve the slowness. Changing networks, computers, or even using 4G could not eliminate the queueing problem. The author opened an issue on the TUNA repository to investigate further:

https://github.com/tuna/issues/issues/659

Using rsync can synchronize the 106 GB of plugin files, avoiding overseas downloads, but it does not solve the “last‑mile” latency.

Jenkins obtains plugin metadata by parsing the update-center.json file, which is signed with a private key. The public key is bundled with the Jenkins distribution. Only update-center.json files that pass the public‑key verification are accepted, preventing arbitrary URL changes from being sufficient.

The relevant pull request that explains this mechanism can be found here:

https://github.com/jenkins-infra/update-center2/pull/245

Understanding the problem makes the solution straightforward. The Jenkins Chinese community has resolved the key and URL issues in three steps (illustrated in the following images):

The entire solution, except for the private key, is open source. It leverages existing compute and storage resources without any cost, thanks to TUNA, GitHub Actions, Gitee Pages, and other open‑source tools.

The mirror adapter repository is available at:

https://github.com/jenkins-zh/mirror-adapter

The most important point is mentioned at the end: to experience ultra‑fast plugin installation, use the Jenkins Simplified Chinese plugin version 1.0.10 .

The Chinese localization plugin can be found here:

https://plugins.jenkins.io/localization-zh-cn