I want to checkout the 2nd Repo in my Jenkins multibranch pipeline

Question

In my Jenkinsfile, the "checkout scm" command will checkout whatever repo I have configured in the configuration panel.

But what if I add a 2nd repo to the Jenkins file - is there any way to check that out to a sepcific directory within the workspace? The catch is that I don't want to hard-code any URLs into my Jenkinsfile. Here's an illustration of what I'm trying to achive:

stage("Checkout") {
  checkout scm // Works fine, checks out the 1st consifured repo to workspace.

  dir("src") {
  checkout scm // Checks out the exact same repo again, but how can I change this to colone the 2nd repo instead?
  }
}

Basically - what could I put instead of the 2nd "checkout scm" that would make it pull the 2nd repo configured in the Multibranch pipeline web config?

And supposing this isn't actually possible - what's even the point of allowing users to provide more than one repo in the config-form if there's no way of checking it out in the script?

Answer 1

Use the url found at yourjenkinshostname.com/pipeline-syntax/ to generate a step for "checkout: General SCM". After that, fill out the info for the repo you want, and click "Additional Behaviors" and add one for "Checkout to Subdirectory".

Lastly click "Generate Pipeline Script". The output from that should be useable in your Jenkinsfile. Completed, the process looks like this:

Syntax Generator Example

Alternatively, if you're used to the checkout step, the "RelativeTargetDirectory" extension class can be used to do this. A checkout step with that included looks like this:

checkout([$class: 'GitSCM', branches: [[name: '*/master']], doGenerateSubmoduleConfigurations: false, extensions: [[$class: 'RelativeTargetDirectory', relativeTargetDir: 'test-dir']], submoduleCfg: [], userRemoteConfigs: [[url: 'https://github.com/jenkinsci/puppet-jenkins.git']]])

The key part being...

extensions: [[$class: 'RelativeTargetDirectory', relativeTargetDir: 'test-dir']]

EDIT: According to issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-32018, the multiple sources of a multibranch job is not for two different repositories, but rather for multiple sources of a single repository.

You'll need to hardcode in URLs, I'm afraid. On approach is to have two multibranch jobs. One has the SCM as repo A and hardcodes a checkout of repo B, the other has repo B as the SCM, and hardcodes a checkout of repo A.