How to determine the current operating system in a Jenkins pipeline

Question

What would be the way to determine the current OS a Jenkins pipeline is running?

Context: I'm building a shared Jenkins pipeline script that should run on all platforms (windows, OSX, linux) and execute something different in each platform.

I tried something like:

import org.apache.commons.lang.SystemUtils

if (SystemUtils.IS_OS_WINDOWS){
   bat("Command")
}
if (SystemUtils.IS_OS_MAC){
   sh("Command")
}
if (SystemUtils.IS_OS_LINUX){
   sh("Command")
}

But even it is running on windows or mac node it always goes into the SystemUtils.IS_OS_LINUX branch

I tried a quick pipeline like this.

node('windows ') {
     println ('## OS ' + System.properties['os.name'])
}
node('osx ') {
     println ('## OS ' + System.properties['os.name'])
}
node('linux') {
     println ('## OS ' + System.properties['os.name'])
}

Each node get correctly run in a machine with the correct OS but all of them print ## OS Linux

any ideas?

Thanks Fede

Answer 1

As far as I know Jenkins only differentiates between windows and unix, i.e. if on windows, use bat, on unix/mac/linux, use sh. So you could use isUnix(), more info here, to determine if you're on unix or windows, and in the case of unix use sh and @Spencer Malone's answer to prope more information about that system (if needed).

Answer 2

Assuming you have Windows as your only non-unix platform, you can use the pipeline function isUnix() and uname to check on which Unix OS you're on:

def checkOs(){
    if (isUnix()) {
        def uname = sh script: 'uname', returnStdout: true
        if (uname.startsWith("Darwin")) {
            return "Macos"
        }
        // Optionally add 'else if' for other Unix OS  
        else {
            return "Linux"
        }
    }
    else {
        return "Windows"
    }
}

Answer 3

Using Java classes is probably not the best approach. I'm pretty sure that unless it's a jenkins / groovy plugin, those run on the master Jenkins JVM thread. I would look into a shell approach, such as the one outlined here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8597411/5505255

You could wrap that script in a shell step to get the stdout like so:

def osName = sh(script: './detectOS', returnStdout: true)

to call a copy of the script being outlined above. Then just have that script return the OS names you want, and branch logic based on the osName var.

Answer 4

The workaround I found for this is

try{
   sh(script: myScript, returnStdout: true)
 }catch(Exception ex) {
    //assume we are on windows
   bat(script: myScript, returnStdout: true)
 }

Or a little bit more elegant solution without using the try/catch is to use the env.NODE_LABELS. Assuming you have all the nodes correctly labelled you can write a function like this

def isOnWindows(){
    def os = "windows"
    def List nodeLabels  = NODE_LABELS.split()
    for (i = 0; i <nodeLabels.size(); i++) 
    {
        if (nodeLabels[i]==os){
        return true
        }
   }
    return false
 }

and then

if (isOnWindows()) {
    def osName = bat(script: command, returnStdout: true)   
} else {
    def osName = sh(script: command, returnStdout: true)
}