Jenkins Job DSL - behaviour conditional on file contents

Question

I have inherited a system which uses Jenkins Job DSL to build the jobs for all our projects, I have little experience with configuring Jenkins and none at all with Jenkins Job DSL, so please be gentle.

Some of these projects are Gradle projects. There is a function, createGradleJob() which creates the gradle job. In this function we build the task list for the job, as a string, based upon some features of the project. eg if it is being built from the master branch we append the 'publish' task. All of these conditional tasks are currently appended based upon the projects branch name, or the presence , or absence of certain files in the projects repo.

I would like to now add a new task into this task list conditional upon the contents of some of these files. Specifically if certain keywords are detected in the projects build.gradle file then certain tasks need to be appended to the task list.

So, is there a way in Jenkins Job DSL to check the contents of a file and use that as a conditional expression?

I have found that I can execute arbitrary shell commands using the shell function, so I thought I could just grep the file, but I can't locate the documentation for this function, so I'm not clear how I can able to access the output of the commands, so as to use them in a conditional expression.

I have found the textFinder function, but this appears to only allow you to fail (or mark as unstable) the build as a result of finding or failing to find, the text, not use the result as a conditional expression.

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to readFileFromWorkspace . It returns the contents of the file as a string. Simply read your file and parse the string as needed using the Groovy and/or Java string utils.

It's not quite clear from your question, but if you're talking about reading files out of the repo to be checked out by the job you're generating , this function won't help. But if the file is already somewhere in the workspace (ie it's one of the files checked out by the seed job), you'll be fine.

The shell command you found adds an "Execute Shell Script" build step to the job being generated. It doesn't actually execute the script there and then, it just copies the contents of the parameter verbatim into the build step ready to be executed when Jenkins runs the job.

For your continued sanity, here is a link to the Job DSL API Documentation