Jenkins Tip: Send notifications on fixed builds in declarative pipeline

In my previous post, I presented a few news about Jenkins and about the fact that I switched to declarative pipelines and Github Organization support for my projects.

The main issue I had with this system is that I lost the ability to get notifications on build that recover. Normally, I would get an email indicating that build X was back to normal, but I haven't found a way to solve that for declarative pipeline.

By following a few posts on StackOverflow, I now have the solution and it is the same problem that was already present in scripted pipelines. Namely, the status of the current build is not set early enough for the notification. Basically, you have to set the notification yourself. Here is what a declarative pipeline looks like:

pipeline {
    agent any

    stages {

        // Normal Stages

        stage ('success'){
            steps {
                script {
                    currentBuild.result = 'SUCCESS'
                }
            }
        }
    }

    post {
        failure {
            script {
                currentBuild.result = 'FAILURE'
            }
        }

        always {
            step([$class: 'Mailer',
                notifyEveryUnstableBuild: true,
                recipients: "[email protected]",
                sendToIndividuals: true])
        }
    }
}

There are two important things here. First, a new stage (success) is added that simply set the result of the current build to SUCCESS once it is done. It must be the last stage on the pipeline. This could also be added as the last step of the last stage instead of adding a new stage, but I think it's clearer like this. The second thing is the failure block in which the result of the current build is set to FAILURE. With these two things, the Mailer plugin now sends notification when a build has been fixed.

I hope that will help some of you. I personally think that it should be much easier than that. All this boilerplate is polluting the pipeline that should be kept more maintainable, but for now it seems, it's the nicest way to achieve that, short of handling all conditions in the post block and sending mail directly there, but that would result in even more boilerplate code.

Related articles