Have Jenkins Fail Fast When Node Is Offline

Question

I have a MultiJob Project (made with the Jenkins Multijob plugin), with a series of MultiJob Phases. Let's say one of these jobs is called SubJob01. The jobs that are built are each configured with the "Restrict where this project can be run" option to be tied to one node. SubJob01 is tied to Slave01.

I would like it if these jobs would fail fast when the node is offline, instead of saying "(pending—slave01 is offline)". Specifically, I want there to be a record of the build attempt in SubJob01, with the build being marked as failed. This way, I can configure my MultiJob project to handle the situation as I'd like, instead of using the Jenkins build timeout plugin to abort the whole thing.

Does anyone know of a way to fail-fast a build if all nodes are offline? I could intersperse the MultiJob project with system Groovy scripts to check whether the desired nodes are offline, but that seems like it'd be reinventing, in the wrong place, what should already be a feature.

Answer 1

I ended up creating this solution which has worked well. The first build step of SubJob01 is an Execute system Groovy script, and this is the script:

import java.util.regex.Matcher
import java.util.regex.Pattern

int exitcode = 0
println("Looking for Offline Slaves:");
for (slave in hudson.model.Hudson.instance.slaves) {
 if (slave.getComputer().isOffline().toString() == "true"){
 println('  * Slave ' + slave.name + " is offline!");
   if (slave.name == "Slave01") {
     println('    !!!! This is Slave01 !!!!');
     exitcode++;
   } // if slave.name
  } // if slave offline
} // for slave in slaves

println("\n\n");
println "Slave01 is offline: " + hudson.model.Hudson.instance.getNode("Slave01").getComputer().isOffline().toString();
println("\n\n");

if (exitcode > 0){
 println("The Slave01 slave is offline - we can not possibly continue....");
 println("Please contact IT to resolve the slave down issue before retrying the build.");
 return 1;
} // if

println("\n\n");

Answer 2

The jenkins pipeline statement 'beforeAgent true' can be used in evaluating the when condition previous to entering the agent.

    stage('Windows') {
      when {
        beforeAgent true
        expression { return ("${TARGET_NODES}".contains("windows")) }
      }
      agent { label 'win10' }
      steps {
        cleanWs()
        ...
      }

Ref:

• https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/syntax/
• https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2018/04/09/whats-in-declarative/