don't fail jenkins build if execute shell fails

Question

As part of my build process, I am running a git commit as an execute shell step. However, if there are no changes in the workspace, Jenkins is failing the build. This is be

Answer 1

Jenkins determines the success/failure of a step by the return value of the step. For the case of a shell, it should be the return of the last value. For both Windows CMD and (POSIX) Bash shells, you should be able to set the return value manually by using exit 0 as the last command.

Answer 2

The following works for mercurial by only committing if there are changes. So the build only fails if the commit fails.

hg id | grep "+" || exit 0
hg commit -m "scheduled commit"

Answer 3

If you put this commands into shell block:

false
true

your build will be marked as fail ( at least 1 non-zero exit code ), so you can add (set +e) to ignore it:

set +e
false
true

will not fail. However, this will fail even with the (set +e) in place:

set +e
false

because the last shell command must exit with 0.

Answer 4

Another one answer with some tips, can be helpful for somebody:

remember to separate your commands with the following rule:

command1 && command2 - means, that command2 will be executed, only if command1 success

command1 ; command2 - means, that command 2 will be executed despite on result of command1

for example:

String run_tests = sh(script: "set +e && cd ~/development/tests/ && gmake test ;set -e;echo 0 ", returnStdout: true).trim()
println run_tests 

will be executed successfully with set -e and echo 0 commands if gmake test failed (your tests failed), while the following code snipped:

String run_tests = sh(script: "set +e && cd ~/development/tests/ && gmake test && set -e && echo 0 ", returnStdout: true).trim()
println run_tests 

a bit wrong and commands set -e and echo 0 in&& gmake test && set -e && echo 0 will be skipped, with the println run_tests statement, because failed gmake test will abort the jenkins build. As workaround you can switch to returnStatus:true, but then you will miss the output from your command.

Answer 5

I was able to get this working using the answer found here:

How to git commit nothing without an error?

git diff --quiet --exit-code --cached || git commit -m 'bla'

Answer 6

Jenkins is executing shell build steps using /bin/sh -xe by default. -x means to print every command executed. -e means to exit with failure if any of the commands in the script failed.

So I think what happened in your case is your git command exit with 1, and because of the default -e param, the shell picks up the non-0 exit code, ignores the rest of the script and marks the step as a failure. We can confirm this if you can post your build step script here.

If that's the case, you can try to put #!/bin/sh so that the script will be executed without option; or do a set +e or anything similar on top of the build step to override this behavior.

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Edited: Another thing to note is that, if the last command in your shell script returns non-0 code, the whole build step will still be marked as fail even with this setup. In this case, you can simply put a true command at the end to avoid that.

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