Disable build replay/rerun at runtime

[bdcarr]

What feature do you want to see added?

Hello, we have a test pipeline that can be triggered off a PR, using a temporary app server that is destroyed at the end of the test. The DNS to access that server is passed to the pipeline as a parameter.

If someone needs to rerun those tests, we have a specific method for doing that while generating a new server, but people are so used to opening Blue Ocean and hitting the 'rerun' button that it's hard to get them to notice the correct method.

It'd be really lovely if we could have something in our pipeline code like:

if (isTemporaryDns) {
  disableRerunningThisBuild()
}

Then it'd force people into looking around a bit, or at least asking for help instead of rerunning the build with the DNS that no longer exists and wondering why it keeps failing.

Upstream changes

No response

Are you interested in contributing this feature?

Contributing to open source is good and right but I barely have time to write this request, sorry. Completely understand that I'm at your mercy here.

[timja]

I think this would be quite difficult to implement given there's various places that use the build link and its not added dynamically.

You might be able to do it with permissions by not granting the replay permission.

Apart that is there a reason that you can't make it so that the pipeline is able to setup the prerequisites so that the easy (natural) path works for the users? Thus enhancing the user/developer experience?

[bdcarr]

Apart that is there a reason that you can't make it so that the pipeline is able to setup the prerequisites so that the easy (natural) path works for the users? Thus enhancing the user/developer experience?

God wouldn't I love that. The amount of odd shit we've done to build around how our test server provisioning works...I'm sure it's possible to solve, just a matter of priorities and resourcing.

Anyway all good, thanks for responding so quickly!

[jtnord]

IIRC (and its been a while) Rerun in Blue Ocean has some funkyness and that if you do not have replay permission it is just a new build triggered with exactly the same parameters (so a permission based thing would not be possible as it would just be a regular build).

Refactoring the pipeline may be out of scope but could you do something like the following at the start so you fail quickly with a clear error message.

node('some-unixy-node') {
  try { 
    sh 'getent hosts ${DNSNAME}'
  } catch (err) {
    error 'There is no DNS entry for the system under test.  Did you mistakenly hit "rebuild"? Please read some internal documentation'
}

[bdcarr]

@jtnord that is a top notch idea, ty. I've been counting on people reading the logs of the 'health check' app test that runs before the others, but it's not very obvious.