NetClaw Gets Jenkins, GitLab, and Atlassian Superpowers
A milestone in human-AI collaborative development
Today we’re excited to announce three major integrations for NetClaw: Jenkins CI/CD, GitLab DevOps, and Atlassian ITSM (Jira + Confluence). These additions bring NetClaw’s MCP integration count to 51 servers with over 180 new tools for network automation workflows.
What We Built
Jenkins MCP Server (16 tools)
NetClaw can now interact with Jenkins CI/CD pipelines through the official Jenkins MCP Server plugin. This isn’t just another API wrapper—it’s a native MCP implementation running inside Jenkins itself using Streamable HTTP transport.
Key capabilities:
- Monitor job and build status across your Jenkins estate
- Trigger parameterized builds with human-in-the-loop confirmation
- Analyze build logs with regex search for troubleshooting
- Track SCM changes and correlate commits with builds
- Verify Jenkins health and authentication
The Jenkins integration uses remote HTTP transport, which is architecturally different from most of our MCP servers. This was a deliberate design decision to leverage Jenkins’ native MCP plugin rather than building a proxy.
GitLab MCP Server (98+ tools)
For teams using GitLab, we’ve integrated the community @zereight/mcp-gitlab server, which provides comprehensive coverage of GitLab’s functionality.
Key capabilities:
- Query and manage issues and merge requests
- Monitor CI/CD pipelines with control operations (trigger, retry, cancel)
- Browse repositories, commits, and file contents
- Manage labels, milestones, releases, and wiki pages
- Support for both gitlab.com and self-hosted instances
- Read-only mode for production safety
We chose the community server over GitLab’s official MCP server because the official version requires GitLab Premium/Ultimate, while the community server works with any GitLab tier.
Atlassian MCP Server (72 tools)
The Atlassian integration via mcp-atlassian brings Jira and Confluence into NetClaw’s toolkit—essential for teams practicing ITSM-gated change management.
Key capabilities:
- Search and manage Jira issues with JQL
- Transition issues through workflows
- Create and update Confluence documentation
- Link issues across projects
- Bulk operations for efficiency
- Support for both Atlassian Cloud and Server/Data Center
Why It Matters
These integrations complete a critical loop in network automation:
- Track changes in GitLab (merge requests, commits)
- Deploy changes through Jenkins pipelines
- Document changes in Jira tickets and Confluence pages
- Audit everything through NetClaw’s GAIT logging
For network engineers, this means you can now ask NetClaw questions like:
- "Show me the Jenkins build that deployed the BGP config change"
- "Create a Jira ticket for the router-01 BGP peer down incident"
- "Find all GitLab merge requests related to firewall rules"
- "Update the Confluence runbook with today’s incident postmortem"
Key Technical Decisions
Human-in-the-Loop for Write Operations
All three integrations enforce human confirmation before any write operation. This isn’t just a best practice—it’s mandated by NetClaw’s Constitution (Principle XIV). When you ask NetClaw to trigger a Jenkins build or create a Jira ticket, it will always present the action for your approval first.
Read-Only Mode Support
Both GitLab and Atlassian integrations support read-only mode, allowing safe observation in production environments. Set GITLAB_READ_ONLY_MODE=true or configure Atlassian with read-only API tokens to restrict operations to queries only.
No Custom Server Code
A deliberate architectural choice: we wrote zero server code for these integrations. All three use existing MCP servers (official Jenkins plugin, community GitLab and Atlassian packages). NetClaw’s contribution is configuration, documentation, and skill workflows that teach the AI how to use these tools effectively for network operations.
The Spec-Driven Development Process
These features were built following NetClaw’s SDD workflow:
- Specify — Define user stories, requirements, and acceptance criteria
- Clarify — Resolve ambiguities (none found—thorough upfront research paid off)
- Plan — Research technical decisions, design data models, document contracts
- Tasks — Generate dependency-ordered, parallelizable task lists
- Implement — Execute tasks with verification checkpoints
- Coherence — Update all artifact touchpoints (README, SOUL.md, TOOLS.md, HUD, etc.)
The entire process—from initial research to merged PR—was a collaboration between John and Claude, with Claude handling the implementation while John provided direction and review.
Constitution Update: v1.1.0
As part of this milestone, we updated NetClaw’s Constitution to add Principle XVII: Milestone Documentation via WordPress. This principle requires that significant development milestones be documented as blog posts—like this one—to create a public record of the project’s evolution.
This blog post is itself the first application of Principle XVII, written by Claude on behalf of the John-Claude collaboration and published via NetClaw’s WordPress MCP integration.
What’s Next
With Jenkins, GitLab, and Atlassian in place, NetClaw now has comprehensive coverage for DevOps and ITSM workflows. Future integrations on the roadmap include:
- Azure DevOps for Microsoft-centric shops
- PagerDuty for incident management
- Terraform Cloud for infrastructure-as-code orchestration
Try It Out
The integrations are available now. Check the NetClaw repository for setup instructions:
# Jenkins (requires Jenkins 2.533+ with MCP Server plugin)
export JENKINS_URL="https://jenkins.example.com"
export JENKINS_USERNAME="your-username"
export JENKINS_API_TOKEN="your-api-token"
# GitLab (works with any GitLab tier)
export GITLAB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN="your-pat"
export GITLAB_API_URL="https://gitlab.com" # or your self-hosted URL
# Atlassian (Cloud or Server/DC)
export JIRA_URL="https://your-domain.atlassian.net"
export JIRA_USERNAME="your-email"
export JIRA_API_TOKEN="your-api-token"This post was written by Claude on behalf of the John-Claude collaboration, demonstrating human-AI pair programming in action. NetClaw is an open-source project building CCIE-level AI agents for network automation.
Tags: netclaw, mcp, jenkins, gitlab, atlassian, jira, confluence, network-automation, ai-collaboration