Background

Starting a process through Jenkins is a fairly common scenario in real-world work.

But under normal circumstances, a process started by a Jenkins job is killed by Jenkins once the build finishes.

This is determined by Jenkins’ process tree management mechanism.

We can work around it by changing the value of a variable, but that approach has a few drawbacks:

It is not intuitive — even after it works, you cannot tell how the problem was solved;
It is hard to think of solving the problem this way.
Poor readability is in fact a problem that should be avoided as much as possible while writing code.

Solution

The pipeline-keep-running-step-plugin plugin provides a more intuitive keepRunning step, offering an elegant solution to this problem.

With the keepRunning step, the name tells you exactly what it does, so the readability problem is solved.

Using it is simple as well. To start tomcat, for example, this is all you need:

keepRunning {
    sh '/usr/local/apache-tomact/bin/startup.sh
}