Display input step as popup so that its intuitive in Jenkins Pipeline - jenkins

I am using Input step in my Jenkins Pipeline. In Teamcity, input step is very intuitive where a popup is displayed to accept the input.
In Jenkins Pipeline, the build pauses with a link to "Input Requested" to accept the input.
Is there a way to display the input step as a popup in Jenkins Pipeline similar to Teamcity one?

Yes, when you are using Pipelines and you are using the View Pipeline plugin, you should run your project and execute your input steps inside a STAGE, for example:
stage 'check-in'
node ('master') {
input 'Are you sure?'
}
And will get something like:
Instead, if you are monitoring the console, you will be prompted as you described.

While it's not exactly the same, the UI rewrite plugin called Blue Ocean ( https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Blue+Ocean+Plugin ) is now past 1.0 and has a much better interface for the input step.
I used this Jenkinsfile:
node(){
stage("primary"){
echo 'test'
input "This is a question?"
}
}
And here's how it looks in Blue Ocean:
Blue Ocean Example

Agreed. But I was looking for something similar to teamcity one because this is still not intuitive to the user. I guess may be this is the best we can get in jenkins.
#tulika how is this achieved in teamcity?
input 'Deploy to Production?'
gives me
input: not found
Process exited with code 127

Related

how could jenkins "pipeline stage" hit all NODE agents with the same "LABLES" name?

As we have already setup the nodes on "Dashboard/Nodes" with the same "Labels" for both 2 nodes:
192.168.1.240 Labels: blog-vue
192.168.1.241 Labels: blog-vue
the Pipeline scripts is as below:
pipeline {
agent {label 'blog-vue'}
stages {
stage("Get hostname") {
steps {
sh "hostname"
}
}
}
}
but, if we click "build" button to run the script, the scripts will ONLY be executed on the first server listed on the node configurations. is here anbody know why? or how could jenkins pipeline "stage" hit all agent nodes with the same "LABLES" name? rather than to write the "agent labels info" in diffrent "stage block" with different "labels names".
Thanks in advance.
This is a shot in the dark, but we had something similar happen when folks copy-pasted the label from one system to another and accidentally grabbed some whitespace at the beginning or end. Try removing everything in the label and manually typing it / selecting it from the dropdown if it appears.
I also see a related issue posted on stackexchange load balancing jenkins
We also use Least Load plug-in like that issue's answer. I would look into it if the label issue isn't of concern.

CI for a monorepo with Jenkins and BlueOcean

I'm trying to figure out what options do I have,
when trying to build a good pipeline for CICD for a monorepo,
I'm trying to have something like this (this is only a pseudo pipeline)
and not really what I'm using ATM in my monorepo (or what I will have).
Explanation:
Pre: understand what I should build, test, etc..
Build dynamically a parallel step which will give me the later explained capabilities.
Foo: run the parallel and comfortably wait:)
This is the only way I thought of getting this features:
* Build process among the P’s can be shared and I can generate some waitUntil statements
to make this works, I guess...
* Every P’s is independent from the other, if one Ut of P2 fails f.e, it doesn't affect the other progress
of the pipeline, or if I want, it's only a failFast configuration
* Every step within the way is again not related to the progress of other P’s,
so when Ut finishes in any of the P's it starts immediately it's St.
(thought this might changed according to some configuration I'll probably need)
The main problems with that is:
1. I'm losing the control the Restart single steps (since I can only restart Top level steps)
2. It requires me to do a lot more with Scripted Pipeline, which looks like the support of BlueOcean
(which is kind of critical to me), is questionable...
seems that BlueOcean is more supported within the scope of the Declarative Pipeline.
NOTE: It probably looks like I can split every P’s to a another jenkins job
but, this will require me to wait a lot of time in checkout workspace+preparation of the monorepo,
and like I said the "build" step may have shared between the P’s and it's more efficient to do this like that
I will appreciate every feedback or any suggestion:)
There's no problem whatsoever with doing what you want with a Declarative pipeline, since stage can have a stages child. So:
pipeline {
stages {
stage("Pre") { }
stage("Foo") {
parallel {
stage ("P1") {
stages {
stage("P1-Build") {}
stage("P1-Ut") {}
stage("P1-St") {}
}
}
stage ("P2") {
stages {
stage("P2-Build") {}
stage("P2-Ut") {}
}
}
// etc..
Stages P1..P4 will run in parallel but within each their Build-unittest-test stages will run sequentially.
You won't be able to restart separate stages but it's not a good feature anyway.

How to pass pipeline variables to post build gerrit message?

I have a Pylint running in a Jenkins pipeline. To implement it, I used Gerrit trigger plugin and Next Generation Warnings plugin. Everything is working as expected - Jenkins is joining the review, checks change with pylint and generates report.
Now, I'd like to post pylint score in a custom "Build successful" message. I wanted to pass the pylint score to a environment variable and use it in dedicated window for Gerrit plugin message.
Unfortunately no matter what I try, I cannot pass any "new" variable to the message. Passing parameters embedded in pipeline works (e.g. patchset number).
I created new environment variable in Configure Jenkins menu, tried exporting to shell, writing to it (via $VAR and env. syntax) but nothing works - that is, build message displays raw string like $VAR instead of what variable contains.
What should I do to pass local pylint score (distinct for every pipeline occurence) to the custom build message for Gerrit?
I don't think the custom message can be used for this. This is just supposed to be a static message.
They way I do this is to use the SSH command to perform the review. You can also achieve the same using the REST API.
First I run my linting and white space checking script that will generate a json file with the information I would like to pass to Gerrit. Next I send it to Gerrit using SSH. See below my pipeline script and an example json file.
As a bonus I have added the robot comments. This will now show up in your review as a remark from Jenkins that line 8 of my Jenkins file has a trailing white space. You can easily replace this with your lint result of you like or just ignore it and only put the message. It is easier to use a json file as it will make it easier to create multi line messages
node('master') {
sh """
cat lint_change.json | ssh -p ${env.GERRIT_PORT} ${env.GERRIT_HOST} gerrit review ${env.GERRIT_PATCHSET_REVISION} --json
"""
}
Example json file:
{
"labels": {
"Code-Style": "-1"
},
"message": "Lint Bot Review\nLint Results:\n Errors: 0\n Warnings: 0\n\nWhitespace results:\n Errors: 1",
"robot_comments": {
"Jenkinsfile": [
{
"robot_id": "lint-bot",
"line": "8",
"message": "trailing whitespace."
}
]
}
}
Alternatively, you may want to look at a new gerrit-code-review-plugin that should make this things even easier. However, I have not tried this yet.

Is there a way to use "propagate=false" in a Jenkinsfile with declarative syntax directly for stage/step?

You can use propagate on a build job as described here:
https://jenkins.io/doc/pipeline/steps/pipeline-build-step/
So you can use something like this to prevent a failing step from failing the complete build:
build(job: 'example-job', propagate: false)
Is there a way to use this for a stage or a step? I know i can surround it with a try/catch and that does works almost as i want. It does ignore the failing the stage and resumes the rest of the build, but it does not display the stage as failed. For now i write all failing stages to a variable and output that on a later stage, but this is not ideal.
If i cant suppress propagation in a stage/step, is there maybe a way to use the build() call to do the same? Maybe if i move it to another pipeline and call that via build()?
Any help appreciated.
With catchError you can prevent a failing step from failing the complete build:
pipeline {
agent any
stages {
stage('1') {
steps {
sh 'exit 0'
}
}
stage('2') {
steps {
catchError(buildResult: 'SUCCESS', stageResult: 'FAILURE') {
sh "exit 1"
}
}
}
stage('3') {
steps {
sh 'exit 0'
}
}
}
}
In the example above, all stages will execute, the pipeline will be successful, but stage 2 will show as failed:
As you might have guessed, you can freely choose the buildResult and stageResult, in case you want it to be unstable or anything else. You can even fail the build and continue the execution of the pipeline.
Just make sure your Jenkins is up to date, since this is a fairly new feature.
There are currently lots of suggestions for the scripted syntax, but for the declarative syntax work is in progress to support this.
Track the progress of https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-26522 which groups all of the pieces together to achieve this. It has some interesting bits already marked as 'Resolved' (meaning a code change was made), such as https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-49764 ( "Allow define a custom status for pipeline stage"). Unfortunately, I cannot find references to any of the tickets involved in the Jenkins changelog which would make sense since the parent ticket is not yet finished.
Of interest might also be the following : https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-45579 which was reopened due to an issue. The environment for this is :
Admittedly, there are a confusing number of tickets tracking this work, but that is probably due to the fact that the functionality being implemented has a number of use-cases.
Another interesting ticket is "Individual Pipeline steps and stages/blocks should have Result statuses" , for which I was able to find a related PR: https://github.com/jenkinsci/workflow-api-plugin/pull/63
It is worth noting that the declarative pipeline was always designed as being opinionated and as such was not meant to support everything possible with the scripted syntax. For more complicated workflows and use-cases where it does not serve your needs, scripted syntax may be the only (and recommended?) option.
For needs such as the one you've stated, if enough noise is made, the declarative pipeline will probably be modified in due course to support it.

Matrix configuration with Jenkins pipelines

The Jenkins Pipeline plugin (aka Workflow) can be extended with other Multibranch plugins to build branches and pull requests automatically.
What would be the preferred way to run multiple configurations? For example, building with Java 7 and Java 8. This is often called matrix configuration (because of the multiple combinations such as language version, framework version, ...) or build variants.
I tried:
executing them serially as separate stage steps. Good, but takes more time than necessary.
executing them inside a parallel step, with or without nodes allocated inside them. Works but I cannot use the stage step inside parallel for known limitations on how it would be visualized.
Is there a recommended way to do this?
TLDR: Jenkins.io wants you to use nodes for each build.
Jenkins.io: In pipeline coding contexts, a "node" is a step that does two things, typically by enlisting help from available executors on agents:
Schedules the steps contained within it to run by adding them to the Jenkins build queue (so that as soon as an executor slot is free on a node, the appropriate steps run)
It is a best practice to do all material work, such as building or running shell scripts, within nodes, because node blocks in a stage tell Jenkins that the steps within them are resource-intensive enough to be scheduled, request help from the agent pool, and lock a workspace only as long as they need it.
Vanilla Jenkins Node blocks within a stage would look like:
stage 'build' {
node('java7-build'){ ... }
node('java8-build'){ ... }
}
Further extending this notion Cloudbees writes about parallelism and distributed builds with Jenkins. Cloudbees workflow for you might look like:
stage 'build' {
parallel 'java7-build':{
node('mvn-java7'){ ... }
}, 'java8-build':{
node('mvn-java8'){ ... }
}
}
Your requirements of visualizing the different builds in the pipeline would could be satisfied with either workflow, but I trust the Jenkins documentation for best practice.
EDIT
To address the visualization #Stephen would like to see, He's right - it doesn't work! The issue has been raised with Jenkins and is documented here, the resolution of involving the use of 'labelled blocks' is still in progress :-(
Q: Is there documentation letting pipeline users not to put stages inside of parallel steps?
A: No, and this is considered to be an incorrect usage if it is done; stages are only valid as top-level constructs in the pipeline, which is why the notion of labelled blocks as a separate construct has come to be ... And by that, I mean remove stages from parallel steps within my pipeline.
If you try to use a stage in a parallel job, you're going to have a bad time.
ERROR: The ‘stage’ step must not be used inside a ‘parallel’ block.
I would suggest Declarative Matrix as a preferred way to run multiple configurations in Jenkins. It allows you to execute the defined stages for every configuration without code duplication.
Example:
pipeline {
agent none
stages {
stage('Test') {
matrix {
agent {
label "${NODENAME}"
}
axes {
axis {
name 'NODENAME'
values 'java7node', 'java8node'
}
}
stages {
stage('Test') {
steps {
echo "Do Test for ${NODENAME}"
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
Note that declarative Matrix is a native declarative Pipeline feature, so no additional Plugin installation needed.
Jenkins blog post about the matrix directive.
As noted by #StephenKing, Blue Ocean will show parallel branches better than the current stage view. A planned upcoming version of the stage view will be able to show all the branches, though it will not visually indicate any nesting structure (would look the same as if you ran the configurations serially).
In any event, the deeper issue is that you will essentially only get a pass/fail status for the build overall, pending a resolution to JENKINS-27395 and related requests.
In order to test each commit on several platforms, I've used this base Jenkinsfile skeleton:
def test_platform(label, with_stages = false)
{
node(label)
{
// Checkout
if (with_stages) stage label + ' Checkout'
...
// Build
if (with_stages) stage label + ' Build'
...
// Tests
if (with_stages) stage label + ' Tests'
...
}
}
/*
parallel ( failFast: false,
Windows: { test_platform("Windows") },
Linux: { test_platform("Linux") },
Mac: { test_platform("Mac") },
)
*/
test_platform("Windows", true)
test_platform("Mac", true)
test_platform("Linux", true)
With this it's relatively easy to switch from a sequential to a parallel execution, each of them having their pros and cons:
Parallel execution runs much faster, but it doesn't contain the stages labelling
Sequential execution is much slower, but you get a detailed report thanks to stages, labelled as "Windows Checkout", "Windows Build", "Windows Tests", "Mac Checkout", etc.)
I'm using the sequential execution for the time being, until I find a better solution.
It seems like there is relief coming at least with the BlueOcean UI. Here is what I got (the tk-* nodes are the parallel steps):

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