Running Pipelines

Running a Pipeline

Multibranch

See the Multibranch documentation for more information.

Parameters

See the Jenkinsfile documentation for more information

Restarting or Rerunning a Pipeline

There are a number of ways to rerun or restart a completed Pipeline.

Replay

See the Replay documentation for more information.

Restart from a Stage

You can restart any completed Declarative Pipeline from any top-level stage which ran in that Pipeline. This allows you to rerun a Pipeline from a stage which failed due to transient or environmental considerations, for example. All inputs to the Pipeline will be the same. This includes SCM information, build parameters, and the contents of any stash step calls in the original Pipeline, if specified.

How to Use

No additional configuration is needed in the Jenkinsfile to allow you to restart stages in your Declarative Pipelines. This is an inherent part of Declarative Pipelines and is available automatically.

Restarting from the Classic UI

Once your Pipeline has completed, whether it succeeds or fails, you can go to the side panel for the run in the classic UI and click on "Restart from Stage".

You will be prompted to choose from a list of top-level stages that were executed in the original run, in the order they were executed. Stages which were skipped due to an earlier failure will not be available to be restarted, but stages which were skipped due to a when condition not being satisfied will be available. The parent stage for a group of parallel stages, or a group of nested stages to be run sequentially will also not be available - only top-level stages are allowed.

Once you choose a stage to restart from and click submit, a new build, with a new build number, will be started. All stages before the selected stage will be skipped, and the Pipeline will start executing at the selected stage. From that point on, the Pipeline will run as normal.

Restarting from the Blue Ocean UI

Restarting stages can also be done in the Blue Ocean UI. Once your Pipeline has completed, whether it succeeds or fails, you can click on the node which represents the stage. You can then click on the Restart link for that stage.

Blue Ocean status

Blue Ocean will not receive further functionality updates. Blue Ocean will continue to provide easy-to-use Pipeline visualization, but it will not be enhanced further. It will only receive selective updates for significant security issues or functional defects.

Alternative options for Pipeline visualization, such as the Pipeline: Stage View and Pipeline Graph View plugins, are available and offer some of the same functionality. While not complete replacements for Blue Ocean, contributions are encouraged from the community for continued development of these plugins.

Preserving `stash`es for Use with Restarted Stages

Normally, when you run the stash step in your Pipeline, the resulting stash of artifacts is cleared when the Pipeline completes, regardless of the result of the Pipeline. Since stash artifacts aren’t accessible outside of the Pipeline run that created them, this has not created any limitations on usage. But with Declarative stage restarting, you may want to be able to unstash artifacts from a stage which ran before the stage you’re restarting from.

To enable this, there is a job property that allows you to configure a maximum number of completed runs whose stash artifacts should be preserved for reuse in a restarted run. You can specify anywhere from 1 to 50 as the number of runs to preserve.

This job property can be configured in your Declarative Pipeline’s options section, as below:

options {
    preserveStashes() (1)
    // or
    preserveStashes(buildCount: 5) (2)
}

1	The default number of runs to preserve is 1, just the most recent completed build.
2	If a number for `buildCount` outside of the range of 1 to 5 is specified, the Pipeline will fail with a validation error.

When a Pipeline completes, it will check to see if any previously completed runs should have their stash artifacts cleared.

Scheduling jobs in Jenkins

The scheduling function lets you schedule jobs to run automatically during off-hours or down times. Scheduling jobs can help you to scale your environment as Jenkins usage increases. This video provides insight on the scheduling function and its various configuration options.

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