Jenkins Pipeline sh display name/label

Question

With Jenkins 2 Pipeline plugin, there's a useful feature allowing a quick overview of the pipeline stages and status of steps, including logging output.

However, if you use the "Shell script" (sh) step, there doesn't seem to be a way to label that script with a useful name, so the display merely shows a long list of "Shell Script" (shown in the image below).

How can I assign a useful name, or how can I use some other step to accomplish the same effect?

Answer 1

It's not perfect, but I generally find it adequate to add an echo step that describes what the following bat or sh step is trying to accomplish. Someone that's never seen it before should be able to figure it out quickly.

echo "Testing with Ping"
bat "ping www.stackoverflow.com"
echo "Getting IPs"
bat "nslookup www.stackoverflow.com"

Answer 2

Following sandy excellent answer, I created a little script wrapper that encapsulates the sh step in a try/finally block.

Basic usage:

wrapper.script script: 'echo the invisible script', returnStdout: true, stepName: "description #1"

Will show "description #1" instead of the generic text.

Full source code and install instructions here https://github.com/ael-computas/jenkins-script-wrapper

Can easily be installed as a library on your jenkins server.

Answer 3

Version 2.28+ of the "Pipeline Nodes and Processes Plugin" has gained the label option for the sh step now with JENKINS-55410:

label (optional)

Label to be displayed in the pipeline step view and blue ocean details for the step instead of the step type. So the view is more meaningful and domain specific instead of technical.

• Type: String

E.g.:

sh "echo foo", label: "my step"

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If you can't upgrade yet, another option is to use the Labelled Pipeline Steps plugin.

Answer 4

Well, desperate times call for desperate measures. If you can use Blue Ocean, you can use parallel step with single execution line.

        parallel(
            "This is my step name" : {
                sh 'env'
            }
        )

Answer 5

Update Feb 2019:

According to gertvdijk's answer below, it is now possible to assign an optional label to the sh step, starting from v2.28, and for those who can't upgrade yet, there's also a workaround. Please check his answer for details and comments!

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Previous version (hover to see it):

As far as I know, that's currently not possible. In the Jenkins tracker, there is a Name or alias Shell Script Step (sh) issue which is similar to your situation:

The sh step adds a "Shell Script" step in the Pipeline. However, there could be multiple such steps including steps from various plugins (e.g., Docker), which makes it hard to distinguish the steps. We should perhaps add an optional parameter to sh to specify a name or alias which would then appear in the pipeline steps. e.g., the following can be the step for npm which would show as "Shell script: npm" in the pipeline view.

sh cmd:"npm install", name: "npm"

However, it was closed as a duplicate of the older Allow stage to operate as a labelled block which has been fixed recently and seems to be included in v2.2 of the pipeline-stage-step-plugin (see changelog).

It seems that stages can now be nested and they will appear in the view table, but I don't think it's what you're looking for.

Answer 6

I was also trying the same thing but in different context, My team don't want multiple sh log window over log UI, so I did try to use multiple UNIX commands in one line e.g jenkinsPipeline.sh "echo \"PATH: $PATH\";java -version;echo PROJ DIR = $projectDirectory;env > env.txt;cat env.txt;ls && cd $projectDirectory && gradle --refresh-dependencies clean assemble" And it worked for Jenkins pipeline script within the Jenkins job. but if I use shared library for extending pipeline and same strategy, then it was not working or else creating multiple windows as usual for sh log in UI.