How do old plugins installed via this update center generator get cleaned up?
Does update center only grow in size, never getting cleaned up by the generator? Thus old plugins are left to handle from the team that manages the custom jenkins update center?
If you have any experience running a custom update center, would greatly appreciate your inputs on cleaning up plugins in custom update center.
How do old plugins installed via this update center generator get cleaned up?
The update center does not control which plugins are installed in Jenkins. Even if plugins are no longer being distributed, that has no effect on plugins that are already installed in Jenkins.
Does update center only grow in size, never getting cleaned up by the generator? Thus old plugins are left to handle from the team that manages the custom jenkins update center?
Yes. artifact-ignores.properties and --allowed-artifacts-file could be used to limit which historical releases of plugins are copied to --downloads-directory, but since the Jenkins project distributes all historical releases of plugins, unless specifically suspended/withdrawn, that’s how this tool works.
To only distribute the current latest releases, you could try chaining together two executions – one only generating the metadata, parse that JSON and transform it into an --allowed-artifacts-file, then create a --downloads-directory based on that.
I should have worded my first question better, my apologies. It was supposed to ask about whether or not the Jenkins Update Center Generator has a mechanism of cleaning up downloaded plugins in the update center download directory, not installed plugins in jenkins instance itself.
For the second question, thanks to your answer it became much clearer to me.