[git] How to trigger a build only if changes happen on particular set of files

How do I tell Jenkins/Hudson to trigger a build only for changes on a particular project in my Git tree?

You can use Generic Webhook Trigger Plugin for this.

With a variable like changed_files and expression $.commits[*].['modified','added','removed'][*].

You can have a filter text like $changed_files and filter regexp like "folder/subfolder/[^"]+?" if folder/subfolder is the folder that should trigger builds.

If you are using a declarative syntax of Jenkinsfile to describe your building pipeline, you can use changeset condition to limit stage execution only to the case when specific files are changed. This is now a standard feature of Jenkins and does not require any additional configruation/software.

stages {
    stage('Nginx') {
        when { changeset "nginx/*"}
        steps {
            sh "make build-nginx"
            sh "make start-nginx"
        }
    }
}

You can combine multiple conditions using anyOf or allOf keywords for OR or AND behaviour accordingly:

when {
    anyOf {
        changeset "nginx/**"
        changeset "fluent-bit/**"
    }
}
steps {
    sh "make build-nginx"
    sh "make start-nginx"
}

Basically, you need two jobs. One to check whether files changed and one to do the actual build:

Job #1

This should be triggered on changes in your Git repository. It then tests whether the path you specify ("src" here) has changes and then uses Jenkins' CLI to trigger a second job.

export JENKINS_CLI="java -jar /var/run/jenkins/war/WEB-INF/jenkins-cli.jar"
export JENKINS_URL=http://localhost:8080/
export GIT_REVISION=`git rev-parse HEAD`
export STATUSFILE=$WORKSPACE/status_$BUILD_ID.txt

# Figure out, whether "src" has changed in the last commit
git diff-tree --name-only HEAD | grep src

# Exit with success if it didn't
$? || exit 0

# Trigger second job
$JENKINS_CLI build job2 -p GIT_REVISION=$GIT_REVISION -s

Job #2

Configure this job to take a parameter GIT_REVISION like so, to make sure you're building exactly the revision the first job chose to build.

I answered this question in another post:

How to get list of changed files since last build in Jenkins/Hudson

#!/bin/bash

set -e

job_name="whatever"
JOB_URL="http://myserver:8080/job/${job_name}/"
FILTER_PATH="path/to/folder/to/monitor"

python_func="import json, sys
obj = json.loads(sys.stdin.read())
ch_list = obj['changeSet']['items']
_list = [ j['affectedPaths'] for j in ch_list ]
for outer in _list:
  for inner in outer:
    print inner
"

_affected_files=`curl --silent ${JOB_URL}${BUILD_NUMBER}'/api/json' | python -c "$python_func"`

if [ -z "`echo \"$_affected_files\" | grep \"${FILTER_PATH}\"`" ]; then
  echo "[INFO] no changes detected in ${FILTER_PATH}"
  exit 0
else
  echo "[INFO] changed files detected: "
  for a_file in `echo "$_affected_files" | grep "${FILTER_PATH}"`; do
    echo "    $a_file"
  done;
fi;

You can add the check directly to the top of the job's exec shell, and it will exit 0 if no changes are detected... Hence, you can always poll the top level for check-in's to trigger a build.

While this doesn't affect single jobs, you can use this script to ignore certain steps if the latest commit did not contain any changes:

/*
 * Check a folder if changed in the latest commit.
 * Returns true if changed, or false if no changes.
 */
def checkFolderForDiffs(path) {
    try {
        // git diff will return 1 for changes (failure) which is caught in catch, or
        // 0 meaning no changes 
        sh "git diff --quiet --exit-code HEAD~1..HEAD ${path}"
        return false
    } catch (err) {
        return true
    }
}

if ( checkFolderForDiffs('api/') ) {
    //API folder changed, run steps here
}

If the logic for choosing the files is not trivial, I would trigger script execution on each change and then write a script to check if indeed a build is required, then triggering a build if it is.

I wrote this script to skip or execute tests if there are changes:

#!/bin/bash

set -e -o pipefail -u

paths=()
while [ "$1" != "--" ]; do
    paths+=( "$1" ); shift
done
shift

if git diff --quiet --exit-code "${BASE_BRANCH:-origin/master}"..HEAD ${paths[@]}; then
    echo "No changes in ${paths[@]}, skipping $@..." 1>&2
    exit 0
fi
echo "Changes found in ${paths[@]}, running $@..." 1>&2

exec "$@"

So you can do something like:

./scripts/git-run-if-changed.sh cmd vendor go.mod go.sum fixtures/ tools/ -- go test