How do I run a task on failure in Jenkins? - jenkins

I've got a Jenkins job that is intended to do the following:
Build a project and deploy it to a test server
Run tests
If the tests fail, roll back the server to the previous version
If the tests succeed, update the version in our source control system
Because we have a single test server, we need to ensure that Jenkins is only running a single version of this job at a time. Unfortunately, we can't seem to find a way to run a job on failure and keep the upstream job from executing while the downstream job is running.
Is there an easy way to do this? Is there a better way?

The Jenkins Post Build Task allows you to run tasks in a job after failure. Rolling the server back sounds more like a task than a job, so that might suit.
Otherwise, there are a couple of plugins that allow for more complex pipelining features. The Pipeline Plugin seems to be the most popular at the moment.

In job configuration, under Advanced Project Options (just before the SCM part), click the Advanced... button. You can now chose to Block build when upstream/downstream is executing
As for running conditional steps on failure:
- Use Post Build Tasks as Paul suggested, or
- Configure logic using Conditional Build steps

Related

How to trigger a job, If the currently running job failed?

In my task I need to trigger a same job if its current build failed.
I don't want the trigger if the build got succeeded.
Is there any plugins or any other method available to do this task?
You can use Downstream Ext Plugin for this:
my_project will be triggered only if this build fails.
Note: if you want to trigger the same job, you should realize that this is a chance to have an infinitive loop. If the build always fails, it will be triggered over and over again...
The best solution is to use Naginator Plugin.
If the build fails, it will be rescheduled to run again after the time you specified. You can choose how many times to retry running the job. For each consecutive unsuccessful build, you can choose to extend the waiting period.
Jenkins Naginator Plugin
Jenkins Naginator Plugin can be used to automatically reschedule a build after a failure.
This becomes very useful in scenarios where the build fail due to unavoidable reasons like a database connectivity is lost, the file system is not accessible etc.
Configurations
Rescheduling configuration is available as a post-build-action. There are a number of configurations for you to pick correctly based on your expected (unavoidable) build failure reason.
Read further on the configurations here with a screenshot.

How do I run, test, and terminate an HTTP server using Jenkins?

I'm working on a team that is building a RESTful HTTP service. We're having trouble with setting up a Jenkins CI job which will build the service, run it in the background, execute some tests, and then terminate the servers.
Specifics
The server is built in Node.js using the hapi framework and has some unit tests written in mocha.
The tests are written in Java using Maven. (Why not node.js-based tests? Because our testing dept. has invested time in creating a Java-based REST-testing framework.)
The build should fail if the node-based unit tests fail or if the java tests fail.
Our Jenkins box is run by a support team elsewhere in the company; our builds execute on a Linux slave.
Current Attempt
We've got something that kind-of works right now, but it's unreliable. We use 3 build steps:
The first build step is an Execute Shell step with the following commands:
npm install
npm test
node server.js ./test-config.json &
Second we do a Invoke Maven 3 step that points to the test pom.xml.
And third we run Invoke Standalone Sonar Analysis to do static code analysis.
This mostly works, but we depend on Jenkins' ProcessTreeKiller to stop the services once the job completes. We always get the warnings stating: Process leaked file descriptors. See
http://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Spawning+processes+from+buildfor
more information
Unfortunately, we've had cases where the service is terminated too soon (before the tests complete) or where the service doesn't get terminated at all (causing subsequent builds to fail because the port is already in use).
So we need something more reliable.
Failed Attempt
We tried setting up a single shell script which handled starting the service, running maven, killing the service, then outputting an exit code. But this didn't work out because the mvn command wasn't available on the command-line. Our Jenkins has multiple maven versions available (and jdks too) and I don't know where they live on the slaves or how to get at them without using the Invoke Maven 3 build step.
Ideas
We've toyed around with some ideas to solve this problem, but are hoping to get some guidance from others that may have solved similar problems with Jenkins.
Have the service self-terminate after some period of time. Problem is figuring out how long to let them run.
Add a build step to kill the services after we're done. Problem is that if the maven execution fails, subsequent steps won't run. (And if we tell maven to ignore test failures, then the build doesn't show as broken if they fail.)
Try killing any existing service process as the first and last steps of the build. Problem is that other teams also use these Jenkins slaves so we need to make sure that the service is terminated when we're done with our build.
Start and stop the node.js services via Maven doing something like this blog suggests. Problem is that we don't know if Jenkins will identify the spawned background task as a "leaked file descriptor" and kill it before we're done testing.
It would be nice if Jenkins had a "Post-build action" that let you run a clean-up script. Or if it had a "Execute background process" build step which would kill the background items at the end of the build. But I can't find anything like that.
Has anyone managed to get Jenkins to do anything remotely like this?
Some brainstorming:
You can turn off Jenkins ProcessTreeKiller, either globally or per invocation. I am not sure why that is not an option for you.
In response to #2, several options:
Post-build actions get executed regardless if build steps had failed or not. This would be a great way to trigger a "service cleanup" task that will run regardless of the build state.
You can setup any build step as post-build action, using Any Build Step plugin, or you can use Post Build Tasks plugin, the latter even gives options to define triggering criteria.
You can change the build state, based on RegEx criteria using Text-finder plugin
You can setup Conditional Build Steps. The "condition" could even be a result of some script execution

Jenkins: Killing downstream jobs and then restart

So I have a Jenkins Job which kicks off other jobs to run test scripts in a particular environment after code has been pushed to that environment (Example: Code is pushed to QA, Test Project is built, and then all QA tests run using "10 separate" test jobs).
This works great for the most part, however, there are times when I get "too many tests running" because people will perform lots of builds to a particular environment and that means I have multiple versions of the same tests running.
I would like to make it such that when a job runs and finishes, if its down stream jobs are currently running, they are stopped and then started again (I want the tests to run on the most recent build instead of having 2 test jobs being run on 2 different builds).
Does anyone know of a good way to do this? Or is there a plugin someone can recommend?
What I can recommend is that you add a batch file containing a HTTP request to cancel the last build of the job in question and then trigger the job in the next step. I think the URL below should help.
So in PostBuild step of JOB-A add a condition(single-and) step to check if the JOB-A successeded then
Execute a batch command to CANCEL JOB-B
AND
Kick off JOB-B again
Thsi should do the trick. (replace the HUDSON_URL)
HUDSON_URL/job/JOBNAME/lastBuild/stop
obviously if you may need to consider authentications if Jenkins requires a login.
Also i would say maybe in JOB-B you might want to set to block if upsteam project is building so it waits for the upstream job if its not running yet.
another reference here:
Hope this helped.

Parallelizing tests with Jenkins

I am using Jenkins for integration testing.
Just to give the context. At the moment I have a separate build server which produces the build daily and Jenkins is not used as the build server. The build server executes the unit testing in my case.
When build process is complete it invokes the Jenkins job. In that job Jenkins start to deploy the build into the Virtual machine. I have a script for doing this.
Followed to that my plan is to run several scripts for doing the end-to-end testing.
Now I have several question in this regard:
How to parallelize the execution of the end-to-end tests?
As I am adding scripts after script I am getting worried how manageable it will be?
I am always using the web interface for adding and changing the scripts. How to do this from the command line?
Any ideas for a good tutorial? Any pointers from all of you? Thanks!
Looks like Build Flow Plugin is what I need.
https://github.com/jenkinsci/build-flow-plugin
You might want to try and see if you can use the Build Pipeline plugin before build flow. Much better visualization of what is going on, less scripting.
I link Build and deploy jobs in one sequence and then have unit and integration test jobs linked separately off the build job. You can then use Fail The Build plugin to have downstream jobs fail upstream ones.

Delaying post-build Jenkins job

I have a Jenkins job which compiles and publishes our Java project to a JBoss server. Obviously, the server takes time to start and deploy the new code. I have a second Jenkins job that runs Selenium tests against the running JBoss instance.
I would like to make the second (Selenium) job be performed automatically as a post-build action from the first job (I have already done this), but I want it to be delayed by, say, 2 minutes. The amount of delay time isn't important, but I can't find anywhere that describes how to delay the start of a post-build job. How would I accomplish this?
In the advanced project options of a project configuration, you can set a "quiet period" that does exactly that. Jenkins will wait the specified amount of time after a build has been triggered before actually starting the build.
Alternatively, you could have the JBoss server trigger the build (e.g. by calling a URL) once it's up and running. The advantage of that is what it would take care of cases where the JBoss server doesn't start for some reason.
You might also want to have a look at the Parameterized Trigger Plugin which allows you to run builds of other projects as build steps. This way you could run the Selenium tests as part of the original job and fail if those tests fail.

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