jenkins fails on building a downstream job

Question

I'm trying to trigger a downstream job from my current job like so

pipeline {
  stages {
    stage('foo') {
      steps{
        build job: 'my-job', propagate: true, wait: true
      }
     }
  }
}

The purpose is to wait on the job result and fail or succeed according to that result. Jenkins is always failing with the message Waiting for non-job items is not supported . The job mentioned above does not have any parameters and is defined like the rest of my jobs, using multibranch pipeline plugin.

All i can think of is that this type of jenkins item is not supported as a build step input, but that seems counterintuitive and would prove to be a blocker to me. Can anyone confirm if this is indeed the case?

If so, can anyone suggest any workarounds?

Thank you

Answer 1

I actually managed to fix this by paying more attention to the definition of the build step. Since all my downstream jobs are defined as multibranch pipeline jobs, their structure is folder-like, with each item in the folder representing a separate job. Thus the correct way to call the downstream jobs was not build job: 'my-job', propagate: true, wait: true, but rather build job: "my-job/my-branch-name", propagate: true, wait: true.

Also, unrelated to the question but related to the issue at hand, make sure you always have at least one more executor free on the jenkins machine, since the wait on syntax will consume one thread for the waiting job and one for the job being waited on, and you can easily find yourself in a resource-starvation type situation.

Hope this helps