The current process for installing and maintaining plugins is a pain. I would like to completely backup a Jenkins installation with the exact versions of plugins installed incase I need to quickly boot up a new Jenkins server with the currently installed plugins and configuration.

I propose that a plugin.xml file is created which specifies the current plugins and the exact version. If a plugin.xml is provided, then jenkins will install all the plugins at the exact version specified. Jenkins can also generate the plugin.xml each time a plugin is updated. The version of jenkins should also be recorded in this file to help with possible problems of having an incorrect jenkins version with a specified plugin version.