On Debian-based distributions, such as Ubuntu, you can install Jenkins through apt-get.

You need to have a JDK and JRE installed. openjdk-7-jre and openjdk-7-jdk are suggested. As of 2011-08 gcj is known to be problematic – see https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-743.

Please make sure to back up any current Hudson or Jenkins files you may have.

Installation

# wget -q -O - http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/debian/jenkins-ci.org.key | apt-key add -
# echo "deb http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/debian binary/" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jenkins.list
# apt-get update
# apt-get install jenkins

Upgrade

Once installed like this, you can update to the later version of Jenkins (when it comes out) by running the following commands:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install jenkins

(aptitude or apt-get doesn’t make any difference.)