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We have some code in git and I started setting up Jenkins to grab our branches and try a compile. It seems that a few of the branches may have begun to rot in the years since they were last built, as they fail to finish a make.

I would like to build all branches that are found, except for a list of excluded ones. Is this possible in Jenkins? This will let me get things up and running, then come back to enable more branches as I try to fix them.

What I have tried so far

Regex with lookahead

Looking at the 'Git > Branches to build' option I was hopeful that I could replace the default '**' wildcard with a :. A bit of digging about and double checking with http://rubular.com/ suggested that the following might do what I wanted.

:^(?!origin/exclude\-this\-branch\.v1|origin/exclude\-this\-branch\-too.v2)(\S+)

Now there is an assumption here about the regex engine running in the background. I would hope it might understand lookahead, but if it does not that explains why this method fails. It seems to build all the branches, including the one I am try to exclude. Maybe I just need to find some more debug?

Looked for similar questions here

I came across Jenkins/Hudson Build All Branches With Prioritization which seemed to contain a possible solution in that some added an inverse option to branch matching https://github.com/jenkinsci/git-plugin/pull/45 sounds like what I need. Sadly this does not seem to be in the version of Jenkins I have, which is odd as 2011 is a long time ago.

The System I Am Using

Ubuntu LTS 14.04. Jenkins ver. 1.611. GNU tool chains to make C/C++ code.

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    This is pretty much a duplicate of this question. You should write a regex that matches only the branches you want to exclude (or simpler would be to add multiple "Branch to build" entries), and then use the "Inverse" choosing strategy. Commented May 7, 2015 at 12:30
  • @ChristopherOrr that sounds like the solution I need. I just could not find out where the inverse options was hidden. I have tried it out and it seems to not work, still tries to build the excluded branch but I will persist. Should you put your comment as an answer so that I can select it or is that not how duplicates are handled? Commented May 7, 2015 at 12:43

2 Answers 2

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How about using 

^(?!.*master).*$

as branch specifier. This regexp means all branches not matching master.

Breakdown:

^(?!.*master).*$ ^ ---> beginning of string (?! ) ---> negative lookahead find all that doesnt match .* ---> zero or more of 'any' character master ---> should not match master .*$ ---> will match anything to the end of string

Related: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18709097/109305

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4 Comments

I stated in the question that I had tried this and it was not working. Maybe the RegEx engine has been updated in the past two years so that it works now. I ended up doing the Inverse choosing strategy as suggested by ChristopherOrr.
how to use ignore for two branches such a master and feature branches
Often, look-ahead (or look-behind) assertions only work with fixed-length strings. Also, in this particular case I believe that you cannot use '|' to combine the things you want to exclude - instead, you must define multiple negative look-ahead assertions in a row. Reference: stackoverflow.com/a/2078924/2773846
so if i take out ?!, then it will match any branches containing master?
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I needed using the Jenkins tool "filter branch by regex", and I discovered flavor of that regex works just with back reference. So, following the Jesper response and this issue, here I did two more examples:

^(?:.*release\/\d+.\d+.\d+(?!.))$ // check all branches like "release/0.0.0" or "origin/release/1.2.3" ^(?:.*release\/\d+.\d+.\d+_any)$ // check all branches like "release/0.0.0_any" or "origin/release/1.2.3_any"

I hope this would helpful for someone

EDIT - New example

^(?:origin\/develop|origin\/master|origin\/release\/\d+\.\d+\.\d+(?!.)|origin\/release\/\d+\.\d+\.\d+(?:_uat|_preprod))$

or

^(?:.*develop|.*master|.*release/\d+\.\d+\.\d+(?!.))$
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2 Comments

What is the purpose of those ?: parts? Shouldn't the first regex simple be ^.*release\/\d+.\d+.\d+$?
Hi Aaron, I give you the code grant where I'm using those regexes: triggers { gitlab(triggerOnPush: true, triggerOnMergeRequest: false, branchFilterType: "RegexBasedFilter", targetBranchRegex: '^(?:(?!feature).)*$') } if you don't use it, that trigger doesn't work.

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