TIL - Validating Jenkins Pipeline from CLI

During last couple of days I’ve been developing Jenkins CI and CD pipelines. Since I’m get used to Python’s linting tools like flake8 workflow where you have to modify your pipeline in Jenkins “replay”, validate there and only then copy to Jenkinsfile was just killing me.

Today I learned that you can easily validate pipeline from CLI Unfortunately, examples there didn’t work for me, so I had to spend some time trying to get them working.

Here’s commands what’s worked for me:

JENKINS_URL=https://jenkins.example.com
USER=user
PASSWORD=password
JENKINS_CRUMB=`curl -s -u $USER:$PASSWORD "$JENKINS_URL/crumbIssuer/api/xml?xpath=concat(//crumbRequestField,\":\",//crumb)"`
curl -X POST -u $USER:$PASSWORD -H $JENKINS_CRUMB -F "jenkinsfile=<Jenkinsfile" $JENKINS_URL/pipeline-model-converter/validate

I’ve integrated them into my Makefile and linting pipelines,and now I’m receiving nice error messages, like:

Errors encountered validating Jenkinsfile:
WorkflowScript: 135: expecting '}', found '' @ line 135, column 1.