ant - Archiving artifacts not in the workspace when build fails

Question

When an ANT build step fails in my build I'd like to archive the logs in order to determine the problem. The relevant logs, however, are not located in the workspace, so I have to use a full path to them.

The standard artifact archiving feature does not work well with full paths, so first I have to copy the logs into the workspace within some build step so that I can later archive them. I do not want to incorporate the copying code into the original ANT script (it does not really belong there). On the other hand, since the build step fails the build I can't execute the code that copies the artifacts into the workspace as a separate build step as it is never reached.

I am considering using ANT -keep-going option, but how will I then fail the build?

Any other ideas (artifact plugins that handle full paths gracefully, for example)?

Update: I've worked around the problem by creating a symbolic link in the workspace to the directory that contains the files to be archived. Kludgy, but effective.

Answer 1

I would recommend using Flexible Publish plugin in conjunction with the Conditional Build Step plugin.

The Flexible Publish plugin allows you to schedule build steps AFTER the build steps have normally run. This allows you to catch both successful and failed builds and execute something - say a script that copies the files from OUTSIDE the workspace to INSIDE the workspace. The Conditional BuildSet plugin allows conditionalizing the steps so that they only run when the build fails. Using these two plugins, you can copy the files into the workspace upon failure, then archive them with the usual Jenkins mechanisms.