A Process Started by Jenkins Always Exits after the Build? Use the keepRunning Step for an Elegant Fix

Background

Starting a process through Jenkins is a fairly common scenario in real work.

But normally, a process started through a Jenkins Job is killed by Jenkins after the build ends.

This is determined by Jenkins’ process tree management mechanism.

We can solve this problem by modifying a variable value, but this approach has some drawbacks:

It is not intuitive; even after solving the problem, you cannot tell how it was solved;
It is hard to think of solving this problem in this way.
Poor readability is in fact something that should be avoided as much as possible in the coding process.

The pipeline-keep-running-step-plugin plugin provides a more intuitive keepRunning step, offering an elegant solution to this problem.

Through the keepRunning step, we can solve the readability problem in a way that tells us what it means just from its name.

Using it is simple too; to start tomcat, for example, you just do this:

keepRunning {
    sh '/usr/local/apache-tomact/bin/startup.sh
}