Jenkins plugins—there are thousands of them, and many are showing their age. But what if modernization didn’t mean endless manual PRs, late-night grep sessions, and plugin archaeology?

Enter the Plugin Modernizer, an OpenRewrite-powered tool helping the Jenkins community breathe new life into its plugin ecosystem. From migrating Java versions (8, 11, 17, and beyond!) to upgrading legacy frameworks like Acegi to Spring Security and JUnit 4 to 5, this tool automates the hard parts—at scale.

This talk shares the story of how a small team of contributors, a GSoC project idea, and a healthy dose of automation kicked off an official Jenkins plugin upgrade campaign. Along the way, we built supporting tools, tracked hundreds of pull requests, and launched a new initiative to help onboard maintainers by cleaning up technical debt before they even start.

Come for the bots, stay for the impact. Whether you're a Jenkins user, plugin author, or just someone who dreams of a healthier open source codebase, you'll leave with ideas (and maybe inspiration) to bring automation into your own project's maintenance story.