Yes the scripts creating the server manage plugin installations too, but it's absolutely fine to install them manually to play with them, and add them to the script later when you're convinced you want to keep them. To make sure a plugin is automatically installed when re-running the machine creation script it should be added to this list: https://github.com/hibernate/ci.hibernate.org/blob/master/manifests/jenki... (this doesn't include configuration of the plugin: just the name) This section is about operating system packages we want installed (like po2xml): https://github.com/hibernate/ci.hibernate.org/blob/master/manifests/jenki... that's the most simple part; exploring around the ci.hibernate.org project you can find any other configuration file you might want edited, like the Maven settings file: https://github.com/hibernate/ci.hibernate.org/blob/master/config/maven/se... or the Jenkins startup configuration: https://github.com/hibernate/ci.hibernate.org/blob/master/config/jenkins/... Jenkins pluging configuration files: https://github.com/hibernate/ci.hibernate.org/blob/master/config/jenkins/... and so on, like SSH keys and Apache HTTPD configuration, additional HTTPD modules to enable, etc.. The repository doesn't contain yet the pull request configuration and things like Twitter or IRC plugin configurations, and so if I had to rebuild the server now I'd have to reconfigure those manually. I'd like to automate those too but the effort balance of automating vs. redoing the work isn't too compelling as I still don't know how to hide the private tokens and passwords which these "latest touches" have. Another way to secure the content of the machine is that I'm taking disk snapshots on S3, so restoring state is possible from S3 too, which implies that storing all details in the scrips is a nice convenience but not particularly critical as there is no risk os losing that work anyway. If you do particularly lenghty tasks just let me know so I'll take some snapshots after you're satisfied with the progress.. or we can even take a snapshot before some operation if you think it's risky: rebuilding a new machine from such a snapshot is a breeze, so have no fear to experiment as you prefer: worst case the service will be down a couple of hours. Sanne On 29 April 2013 23:02, Steve Ebersole <steve(a)hibernate.org&gt; wrote: