Devops article 34: Shared library usage in pipelines, Multiple functions inside groovy script
What you will Learn:
Usage of shared libraries in pipeline
Multiple functions inside groovy script
Usage of shared libraries in pipeline
Jenkins shared libraries can be used for code re-usability in pipeline jobs. Suppose you have a code logic being used in a pipeline job. If you want to use the same logic in another job, you can do so using shared libraries.
Let us see practically how to do that. The first step is to create a folder ‘vars’ inside repository and create greetings.groovy file inside this folder as shown below. The ‘vars’ folder will have our groovy scripts inside which we will be putting our reusable functions. You can name the file anything you want but file extension should be .groovy
So, greetings.groovy will be our shared library.
Let us define a function ‘call()’ in this file which accepts 1 argument ‘name’ as shown below
Important note: Make sure that the function name is call() otherwise you will get error later. The reason being, groovy calls the call() function by default.
Let us now write line#3 to print out something
Commit this file
Go one directory backwards as shown below and copy the url
Next in Jenkins dashboard, go to ‘Manage Jenkins > click Configure System’
Scroll to the page bottom, you would find ‘Global Pipeline Libraries’
Click Add and give some library name
Next, since our ‘vars’ folder is inside the ‘main’ branch, we will mention ‘main’ in the ‘Default version’ field
Next, we see a section ‘Retrieval method’ where we define how to retrieve shared libraries. The repository url that you had copied above, paste it in the ‘Project Repository’ field as shown below
Leave remaining fields as they are. Note down the library name that we mentioned above
Click Save.
Create a new pipeline job.
To use the functions of library, we have to first import the library. The syntax is @Library(‘<Library name>’) _ as shown in line#1 below
We then write the pipeline structure as shown below
Now we will call the shared library. The groovy function name inside shared library is ‘greetings’ that takes 1 argument
So we call this groovy function as shown below and pass an argument
Apply/Save/Build.
See the logs and notice the output as shown below. The ${name} is being replaced by Testuser1
The entire code is:
@Library('SharedLib') _
pipeline
{
agent any
stages
{
stage('Demonstration of shared library')
{
steps
{
greetings("Testuser1")
}
}
}
}
You can similarly use the same library in another pipeline job.
Let us configure the above job and call the function multiple times as shown below
Apply/Save/Build. Notice that the o/p gets printed 3 times as shown below
Multiple functions inside groovy script
Let us add one for groovy script file inside ‘vars’ folder, but this time let us not have call() function
Commit this file.
Configure the same job and add below 2 lines. This time we have to call the respective function name (add or sub) unlike earlier where we did not call the call() function
Apply/Save/Build.
The build will fail as shown below
The reason is math.sub(10,7) is groovy syntax. In declarative pipeline, we should not use groovy syntax directly. We should wrap the groovy syntax inside the ‘script’ block as mentioned in the above error.
Configure the same job and wrap the 2 lines under script{} block
Apply/Save/Build.
This time the build is successful as shown below
This is how we can use shared libraries in pipeline jobs.
Complete code:
@Library('SharedLib') _
pipeline
{
agent any
stages
{
stage('Demonstration of shared library')
{
steps
{
greetings("Testuser1")
greetings("Testuser2")
greetings("Testuser3")
script
{
math.sub(10,7)
math.add(5,15)
}
}
}
}
}
Thank you for reading!
