Pipeline in a nutshell

• A moment of history: Pipeline plugin was developed after the success of Build Flow Plugin and it was first called 'Workflow Plugin'.

• It's considered to be better than freestyle type because it's implemented in code, survives restarts and can be extended easily.

• Pipeline supports two syntaxes, Declarative and Scripted.

• Here is an example for simple declarative pipeline

  • 'step' is a single task and tells Jenkins what to do.
  • 'stage' is a collection of steps. Example for stages: 'Test', 'Build', 'Deploy'.
  • 'node' allocates an executor and workspace for executing the steps in all the stages

• To use Jenkins pipeline, you need Jenkins 2 and Pipeline plugin installed.

• Scripted pipeline is written in Groovy.

• You can create a new pipeline by using Jenkins UI or adding a Jenkinsfile in the relevant repository. Using Jenkinsfile is recommended.

• To declare pipeline with UI -> click on 'new item', enter the name, choose 'Pipeline' from type options and click on 'save'.

• You can use https:///pipeline-syntax as built-in documentation for generating simple or complex pipeline snippets.

• There are several types of variables supported in a pipeline. You can find updated reference on global variables here: https:///pipeline-syntax/globals

  • env variables are accessible from Groovy code with 'env.<var_name>'.
  • params are read-only variables exposed for you to use in the pipeline.
  • currentBuild variables are set in the context of a specific build

• A reference of the available steps can be found here. There is also such reference in your Jenkins instance https:///pipeline-syntax/html

• Pipeline examples can be found here