groovy - Can I use a Closure to define a stage in a Jenkins Declarative Pipeline?

Question

I'm trying to do something like this:

def makeStage = {
  stage('a') {
    steps {
      echo 'Hello World'
    }
  }
} 
pipeline {
  agent none
  stages {
    makeStage()
  }
}

But it gives me this exception:

WorkflowScript: 11: Expected a stage @ line 11, column 5.
   makeStage()
   ^

Is it possible to define a stage as a external closure and if so - how?

Answer 1

Super late, but in case anyone runs into this issue, a possible solution would be to wrap your generated stage around a script declarative and invoke .call on the generated stage.

So for you:

def makeStage = {
  return {
    stage('a') {
      echo 'Hello World'
    }
  }
}

pipeline {
  agent none
  stages {
    stage ('hello world') {
      steps {
        script {
          makeStage().call()
        }      
      }
    }
  }
}