[Jenkins] Automatically retry a failed build

Are your Jenkins builds failing due to unavoidable reasons like unavailability of external databases, file systems etc? The only solution you might be having right now is to reschedule the build after fixing that external issue. In this post, I will be discussing on how you can automatically rerun a failed build.

Setup

For this, we are going to use a plugin named Naginator, version 1.8 is available here for download. As the first step, please install this plugin into your Jenkins.

When it is installed, there will be a new action named "Retry build after failure" added to the post-build action list in job configuration page (as shown).

Configuration

First create a new job. If you need to retry an existing job, please open the job configuration page. Then click on the "Add post-build action" button and select "Retry build after failure". This will add a new configuration section as shown in the below image.

There are 3 configuration settings (as numbered in above image). Let's discuss each in details below.

Setting 1 -> Rerun build for unstable builds as well as failures

This option is there to indicate whether you should be retrying the UNSTABLE state builds as well in addition to FAILURE state builds. Let's set it to true.

Setting 2 -> Delay before schedule

This allows you to define how long to delay a retrying build start-time from the time it was failed. There are two options to choose from; one is to provide a "fixed period" and the other is to provide an "increasing period". Let's use fixed period; and set 300 there (meaning 5 mins).

Setting 3 -> Max number of successive failed build

This is used to control the number of continuous failure builds. Jenkins will not automatically retry more than this maximum number of consecutive failures. So let's set 2 there so that it is retried only two times.

Conclusion

As expected, this is working without any issues and stops retrying as soon as the build is successful. Hope this will help you in avoiding manual retries.