The Flowers Are Still Standing

07 January 2015

There are a ton of Jenkins plugins out there that let you control when a job should run based on the status of other builds. However, plugins typically become out of date pretty quickly. If you don’t want to have to play the plugin update game, you can use a little bash magic to leverage the Jenkins REST API to check the status of other jobs before running your builds. Let’s assume that you have a job named other-job that must be in a success state in order for another job to execute. You can check the status of the other-job by using the Jenkins REST API as part of an executed shell in the job’s configuration:

job_status=`curl https://jenkins/view/job/other-job/lastBuild/api/json | grep "\"result\":\"SUCCESS\""`

if [ -n "$job_status" ]
then
    # Run your script commands here
else
  echo "BUILD FAILURE: Other build is unsuccessful or status could not be obtained."
  exit 1
fi

The then block of this other job could even do something like invoke another build that has a parameterized configuration to run your actual build via the REST API. This would allow you to have the job with the configuration above check the status of other-job first and then kick of a third job that actual performs the build, but only if the first job is successful, all without installing any additional plugins.

Check Jenkins Job Status via REST API