Jenkins with pylint gives build failure

Question

I added a build step to execute a Python script.
In this script pylint is called with the lint.Run(..args) to check the code.
The script works but in the end, the bu

Answer 1

I agree with @dmeister, but with pipeline code (Jenkinsfile) I suggest a try/catch and then parsing the error. This way you can determine if you're just getting status bits from pylint (see the Pylint docs), whether pylint reports a usage error, or whether there was a catastrophic fail:

try {       
    sh 'pylint --output-format=parseable my_module'
} catch ( pylint_rc ) {
    // pylint_rc will be of the form
    // "hudson.AbortException: script returned exit code NN"
    // where NN is 1-63 and represents bit field;
    // bits 0-4 indicate lint-ish issues in analyzed code,
    // bit 5 indicates pylint usage error
    echo "pylint_rc= \'$pylint_rc\'"
    String rc = "$pylint_rc"
    String code = rc.split()[5]
    echo "Isolated return code string value $code"
    int value = code.toInteger()

    // catastrophic/crash error returns a 1; else there is a pylint return code
    int error_bits_code = value & 0x20
    int lint_bits_code = value & 0x1f
    echo "pylint error_bits_code=$error_bits_code ; lint_bits_code=$lint_bits_code"
    if ( (value == 1) || (error_bits_code != 0) ) {
        currentBuild.result = "FAILURE"
        throw pylint_rc
    }
}

Apologies to groovy purists - groovy isn't my thing, so I'm sure this can be improved on - let me know. There is one known hole: if pylint detects only "fatal"-type errors (bit 0) and no other issues of any kind (bits 1-4 are not set) then this code will incorrectly throw an exception. But my code flags tons of issues, so that's not a problem for me. The fix (?parse error msg?) might be trivial for someone with groovy chops.