Jenkins Pipeline sh bad substitution

Question

A step in my pipeline uploads a .tar to an artifactory server. I am getting a Bad substitution error when passing in env.BUILD_NUMBER, but the same commands works when the number is hard coded. The script is written in groovy through jenkins and is running in the jenkins workspace.

sh 'curl -v --user user:password --data-binary ${buildDir}package${env.BUILD_NUMBER}.tar -X PUT "http://artifactory.mydomain.com/artifactory/release-packages/package${env.BUILD_NUMBER}.tar"'

returns the errors:

[Pipeline] sh
[Package_Deploy_Pipeline] Running shell script
/var/lib/jenkins/workspace/Package_Deploy_Pipeline@tmp/durable-4c8b7958/script.sh: 2: 
/var/lib/jenkins/workspace/Package_Deploy_Pipeline@tmp/durable-4c8b7958/script.sh: Bad substitution
[Pipeline] } //node
[Pipeline] Allocate node : End
[Pipeline] End of Pipeline
ERROR: script returned exit code 2

If hard code in a build number and swap out ${env.BUILD_NUMBER} I get no errors and the code runs successfully.

sh 'curl -v --user user:password --data-binary ${buildDir}package113.tar -X PUT "http://artifactory.mydomain.com/artifactory/release-packages/package113.tar"'

I use ${env.BUILD_NUMBER} within other sh commands within the same script and have no issues in any other places.

Answer 1

This turned out to be a syntax issue. Wrapping the command in ''s caused ${env.BUILD_NUMBER to be passed instead of its value. I wrapped the whole command in "s and escaped the nested. Works fine now.

sh "curl -v --user user:password --data-binary ${buildDir}package${env.BUILD_NUMBER}.tar -X PUT \"http://artifactory.mydomain.com/artifactory/release-packages/package${env.BUILD_NUMBER}.tar\""

Answer 2

Actually, you seem to have misunderstood the env variable. In your sh block, you should access ${BUILD_NUMBER} directly.

Reason/Explanation: env represents the environment inside the script. This environment is used/available directly to anything that is executed, e.g. shell scripts.

Please also pay attention to not write anything to env.*, but use withEnv{} blocks instead.

Answer 3

Usually the most common issue for:

Bad substitution

error is to use sh instead of bash.

Especially when using Jenkins, if you're using Execute shell, make sure your Command starts with shebang, e.g. #!/bin/bash -xe or #!/usr/bin/env bash.

Answer 4

I can definitely tell you, it's all about sh shell and bash shell. I fixed this problem by specifying #!/bin/bash -xe as follows:

node {
    stage("Preparing"){
        sh'''#!/bin/bash -xe
            colls=( col1 col2 col3 )
            for eachCol in ${colls[@]}
            do
              echo $eachCol
            done
        '''
    }      
}

Answer 5

I was having the issue with showing the {env.MAJOR_VERSION} in an artifactory of jar file . show I approaches by keeping of environment step in Jenkinsfile.

pipeline {
agent any
environment {
MAJOR_VERSION = 1
}

stages {
stage('build') {
  steps {
      sh 'ant -f build.xml -v'
 }
}
}
post {
 always{
   archiveArtifacts artifacts: 'dist/*.jar', fingerprint: true
 }
}
}

I got the issue solved and then it was not showing me bad substitution in my Jenkins build output. so environment step plays a more role in Jenkinsfile.