provide an easy way to diagnose CI / CD pipeline failures

[jstrachan]

we've been finding some builds sometimes fail inside a CI / CD pipeline but not on a users laptop. So it'd be nice if folks had a way to try diagnose build failures a little easier.

Ideally long term we'd turn a build pod into a Che Workspace that folks could just open. Though there's the issue that build pods tend to be composed (maven + clients + jnlp) whereas Che workspaces tend to be one single docker image with all the CLI tools there.

So maybe we just provide a way to let folks fork a failing pipeline and add a dummy input step into the pipeline before the failure line; then re-run that pipeline; then let folks kubectl exec -it nameOfPod -c containerName bash then they can cd into the folder and run whatever commands they need etc.

I wonder if we can improve on this somewhat? e.g. automatically generating the PR for the build failure with the input added? Automating the CLI commands to ssh into the paused build pod, cd to the right folder and run the last failing command?

[jstrachan]

I think CloudBees has a pause/resume/retry thingy but its not available in the OSS version AFAIK

[jstrachan]

we could do something like create a Pod YAML and add it to the Jenkins build as an artifact thats based on the Jenkins pipeline build pods; then make the pod do the git clone on startup (via an init-container) & then wait; so that folks could kubectl exec into it?

here's an example init-container to do a git clone on startup to a volume (which can be mounted into all the containers in the pod)
https://github.com/fabric8io/fabric8-platform/blob/master/apps/keycloak/src/main/fabric8/deploymentConfig.yml#L12-L29

so that whether you work in the 'maven' container of the Pod or the clients container - the same git clone is visible?

[jstrachan]

then to test out a build, folks could just run this pod YAML then kubectl exec into the pod? if we put this YAML at a canonical place in Jenkins we could then write a gofabric8 CLI to run a command in the latest build's Pod YAML or something?

[rupalibehera]

should this issue be moved here https://github.com/fabric8io/fabric8-pipeline-library, this repo looks to be deprecated.

[jstrachan]

DOH! I meant to do that sorry ;) lemme do that now

[jstrachan]

replaced with fabric8io/fabric8-pipeline-library#318