Avoid deploying artifact at the end of release build

Question

I have a maven job in jenkins. Normally at the end of the build the artifacts will be deployed to artifactory via jenkins post build action. But if I make a release build I get an error from jenkins in this case. So, is there a possiblity to avoid deploying the artifacts at the end of a release build.

Let me precise the error. The maven goals are 'clean install'. I need the post action for deploying to artifactory by a 'normal' job. If I make a release of this artifact via the M2 Release Plugin the deploying of the relased artifacts will be done by the M2 Release Plugin itself. But at the end of the job the post action tries to deploy artifact with the old SNAPSHOT version which is not allowed by artifactory.

Answer 1

Jenkins M2 release plugin (used maven-release-plugin of Maven). If you have created a Maven job (instead of a Free Style), then in M2 Release section in job's configuration, you'll see the goals are:

-Dresume=false release:prepare release:perform 

If you replace it with the following M2 release plugin won't call deploy goal which is initiated by release:perform goal by default.

-Dresume=false release:prepare release:perform -Darguments="-Dmaven.deploy.skip=true"

In my case, I didn't want the artifacts to go to Artifactory as soon as release:perform and release:prepare goals were completed, so the above helped. But, even though Jenkins job has a Post Build action as "Deploy to Artifactory" to either snapshot or release repositories (depending upon what kind of build you have aka automated/manually run build job OR by running Perform Maven Release ), it never called the post build action.

This can be good in the sense, now I can call deployment using the generated release artifacts in an environment and if the deployment/some IT tests are successful, then I can upload the artifacts to Artifactory. Downside is, what if your deployment depends upon fetching the new artifact from Artifactory/Nexus (i.e. somewhere in deploy script's logic) then you can't have that working until you copy artifacts from one job to another child job.

Apart from that, maven deploy goal requires valid / settings in either settings.xml or pom.xml where the you specify for each of the above sections, which are defined under section, must match with the value of section defined in setting.xml/pom.xml.

One can defined / set the value of section to use a non-release repository which is higher in order (for artifact resolution) than a snapshot repository i.e. use libs-alpha-local or libs-stage-local and then let maven deploy goal deploy the artifacts to Artifactory/Nexus.

Later, upon successful deployments to higher environments (like QA/PRE etc), you can move the artifact from alpha/stage to libs-release-local.

IS_M2RELEASEBUILD Boolean variable which comes with M2 Release plugin can be used in a conditional step to deploy here or there or not at all.

Answer 2

In the configuration of the 'Maven release build' you can set in the advanced mode a 'Release environment variable' (default is IS_M2RELEASEBUILD). Later in the post-bild-action 'publish artifacts' you can check if this environment variable is set and then the deploying is skipped.

Answer 3

I'm thinking you may want to create a separate jenkins job just for your release builds. And under post build action to run different set of maven commands just to package the artificat and not install it to the artifactory. That being said if other applications depends on that artifact you do not want to release. This may be causing versioning problems.

Answer 4

You should take a look at Artifactory Jenkins plugin. 1. It deploys with errors. 2. It has built in release functionality. 3. It will provide you with unique buildInfo functionality for saving build information tougher with artifacts in Artifactory, https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Artifactory+Plugin

Answer 5

If I can assume you're using the M2 Release Plugin, then there's another issue. Skipping the deployment after a release would be an unnecessary workaround, since I've seen this work. You should try to fix this by the root cause. It would help if you could provide more info about the error.