Handle failures

Declarative Pipeline supports robust failure handling by default via its post section which allows declaring a number of different "post conditions" such as: always, unstable, success, failure, and changed. The Pipeline Syntax Reference Guide provides more detail on how to use the various post conditions.

pipeline {
    agent any
    stages {
        stage('Test') {
            steps {
                sh 'make check'
            }
        }
    }
    post {
        always {
            junit '**/target/*.xml'
        }
        failure {
            mail to: team@example.com, subject: 'The Pipeline failed :('
        }
    }
}▼

node {
    /* .. snip .. */
    stage('Test') {
        try {
            sh 'make check'
        }
        finally {
            junit '**/target/*.xml'
        }
    }
    /* .. snip .. */
}▼

Scripted Pipeline however relies on Groovy’s built-in try/catch/finally semantics for handling failures during execution of the Pipeline.

In the test example above, the sh step was modified to never return a non-zero exit code (sh 'make check || true'). This approach, while valid, means the following stages need to check currentBuild.result to know if there has been a test failure or not.

An alternative way of handling this, which preserves the early-exit behavior of failures in Pipeline, while still giving junit the chance to capture test reports, is to use a series of try/finally blocks: