The Jenkins Pipeline plugin has a feature known as "lightweight checkout", where the master only pulls the Jenkinsfile from the repo, as opposed to the entire repo. There's a corresponding checkbox in the configuration screen. I'd like to do a lightweight checkout in a multibranch pipeline, but I'm not seeing a checkbox in the multibranch configuration screen. Any ideas how to make this happen? I noticed some closed issues that suggest this feature is available, but I wasn't able to find any specifics on how to make it happen.
Related information:
https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-42518
https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-33273
https://github.com/jenkinsci/bitbucket-branch-source-plugin/pull/78
I asked the developer, Vivek Pandey, who added the lightweight checkout feature to the multibranch plugin and he said that's the default behavior for the multibranch pipeline. Here's his response:
For multi-branch pipeline project GitHub or Bitbucket light weight checkout is default behavior. With bitbucket it wasn’t and that’s what my PR fixed. So basically you don’t need to do any configuration, it should work out of the box.
Related
Jenkins provides lengthy documentation regarding how to specify which branches it will build from. https://plugins.jenkins.io/git/
None of that though answers this specific question, or if it does, I cannot seem to achieve this.
How to specify that Jenkins will use whichever branch is normally checked out when cloning, such as the default branch specified in Github
Does this even make sense or is this even possible?
EDIT: specifically what should go in the red circle to checkout the default branch in Github
Jenkins respects the default branch over HEAD. Also, it depends how you configure you Jenkins job if it's a mulit-branch pipeline then you don't need to specify which branch it should build, by default it will scan you GitHub repo and build the changes made on branch and it will trigger the build.
If it's pipeline job then you can specify which branch it should built by editing the job configuration on Jenkins job and specifying the particular branch name in the section Branches to build
I hope this is what you are looking for.
I think I'm missing something quite simple here so I thought I would ask.
I have a development branch that developers raise PR's against, when this occurs I would like my Jenkins pipeline to automatically trigger.
Then once a merge happens and a push goes to the development branch, I want to do some extra steps which I have configured in the pipeline successfully.
The problem is how do I get Jenkins to automatically checkout and build branches that have a PR raised against development?
Currently I'm using GitHub hook trigger for GITScm polling and I can see the triggers in github being fired but it just constantly rebuilds the master branch instead of the branch that the PR is being raised on.
We are using github-branch-source and this automatically builds PRs.
There is a nice documentation: cloudbees docu
I have set up a multibranch pipeline job for a repository in SVN. Since I want to keep the jenkinsfiles the same in all branches, they are not really located in the branches, but in a different location and only referenced via svn:externals.
Unfortunately the multibranch pipeline does not seem to follow these references and doesn't find the jenkinsfiles (the paths are correctly set):
Checking candidate branch /branches/aaa/bbb/ccc#HEAD
‘ddd\eee\fff\jenkinsfile' not found
Does not meet criteria
Is there any way to tell Jenkins and the multibranch-pipeline plugin setup to also follow svn:externals when looking for the jenkinsfiles?
By default, Jenkins is trying to get the Jenkinsfile with a lightweight checkout which does not consider svn:externals.
This behavior can be (only generally) deactivated, see https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Subversion+Plugin, chapter "lightweight checkout capability for Subversion on Multibranch Pipeline projects and Externals support"
I am currently using Cloudbees Jenkins Coreas my Jenkins solution.
I am using Jenkins Pipelines to write our Jenkins job configuration. These pipelines are stored in GitHub repositories. Each Jenkins job when created is connected to a GitHub Repository where the source code is pulled from, and that's where the Jenkinsfile is stored and Jenkins reads from.
Below are some high-level photos for how our Jenkins jobs are configured.
The advantage of the way these jobs are configured is the Jenkinsfile is always read from the master branch. Meaning if a rouge developer tries to remove stages from the Jenkinsfile from within there own branch, it doesn't matter because the Jenkinsfile is always read from the master branch (which is always protected).
However, the one massive drawback to this - is how do teams and developers who are devops engineerings make changes to the Jenkinsfile? For example, let's say a developer creates a branch called feature-jenkins-search and they edit the Jenkinsfile adding a new stage in the pipeline. Whenever they push these changes to GitHub to test - they can't test as it's always read from the master branch? Meaning devops engineerings have to work directly on the master branch? Surely this is not the best way to go and there is a better configuration to set?
We do want to still provide the security that if a developer is rougue and
You should really look into the Jenkins multi-branch pipeline feature. The Jenkins multi-branch pipeline allows to create a single configuration item in Jenkins (a bit like a folder) that can detect all the branches and pull requests in a GitHub repository with a Jenkinsfile and build them using automatically created jobs. Inside this multi-branch pipeline object when it is configured in Jenkins, you will find a number of jobs to build the various branches and pull-requests in the GitHub repository.
So your developers should maintain a Jenkinsfile in every branch they work on in GitHub to build that branch in your Jenkins server.
It is possible to make the Jenkinsfile do branch specific handling if required with conditional stages / when conditions in the Jenkinsfile pipelines in each branch.
You can lock down the master branch so that code and Jenkinsfile changes from other branches can only be merged with an approved PR (pull request). There is good integration between Jenkins and GitHub such that you can configure the master branch to only allow a PR to be merged if the PR is buildable in Jenkins. So if developers add new stages / processing to a Jenkinsfile on a branch being merged to master, it should be validated so that builds of your master branch are not broken.
There is a lot of configurability in the Jenkins multi-branch pipeline object for detection and handling of branches and it may be necessary to experiment to get it right for what you need with your team. If you cannot find this feature in Jenkins, it is probably because the correct Jenkins pipeline and GitHub related plugins are not installed.
You could also have a look at a similar Jenkins feature called the Jenkins GitHub Organization Folder which allows to detect and build all repos and branches at a GitHub Organization level. But when starting out, I would suggest to look into the multi-branch pipeline at the single repo level first.
These features are discussed in the Jenkins pipeline documentation. We use these features with our internal GitHub and Jenkins server and it works very well.
I think you will find the idea of using a single Jenkinsfile in the master branch to be used for building all branches is unworkable, as you have seen!
I am migrating my old Jenkins free-style job to multi-branch pipeline. I also want to use GitLab hook with them.
My problem is the branch detection. I am doing it manually but I want it to be automatic: when a new branch is pushed to git, GitLab trigger a Jenkins job that trigger the branch detection if the branch parameter from GitLab is not known for Jenkins at the moment. Is this possible to do it or doesn't this exist?
FYI: I tried to launch the multi-branch pipeline job but Jenkins says:
ERROR: No parameterized job named XXX found.
Enable "Build Periodcally" in your multibranch job configuration and the branch indexing will automatically started.
What you really need is a branch source plugin for GitLab with webhook integration, which is tracked as an RFE in JIRA.
Failing that, use a plain Git branch source and configure GitLab to send Jenkins notifications to /git/notifyCommit (IIRC) as documented on the Git plugin wiki. Need specify only a url, no other details. The branch indexing this triggers should both detect new or removed branches, and changes to the head of an existing branch, and schedule builds accordingly.
You can set webhook in GitLab for push events and URL like http://<yourserver>/git/notifyCommit?url=<URL of the Git repository>.
See https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Git+Plugin#GitPlugin-Pushnotificationfromrepository
GitLab notifies Jenkins on push events which should trigger branch detection also for multibranch pipeline.
I didn't receive the answer I wanted and I ran into this issue today that answered the question :
https://github.com/jenkinsci/gitlab-plugin/issues/298
TLDR: Multi-branch pipeline are not supported yet to be triggered by gitlab commit easily. There is a workaround. Look at the link above.