Jenkins powershell plugin always builds successfully

For me, I wanted the script to stop and fail in Jenkins soon as it hit an error. This was accomplished by adding this to the start of the script:

$ErrorActionPreference = "Stop"

This is discussed here: [How to stop a PowerShell script on the first error?][1]

[1]: How to stop a PowerShell script on the first error?. ..................

I want to add here that I just ran into a quirk: you must have the powershell script end with exit and not return.

My jenkins pipe looked like:

script {
  result = powershell(returnStatus: true, script: '''...if(error condition) { return 1 }''')
  
  if(result) { error }
}

I was using if(error condition) { return 1 } and while the 1 was showing up as the return value in the jenkins console, it was not failing the build. When i used if(error condition) { exit 1 }, the build failed as expected.

I think this is a helpful addition to this thread - the need to use exit and not return. But I don't understand this part: the pipe is checking for result to be non-zero. What is the difference between exit and return in a powershell directive that makes if(result) { error } not work as expected when using return?

Update Feb-16-2021: Coming back to this to add some more notes from my experience: I think what I was doing and what a lot of people do that confuses things, is to use returnStdout or returnStatus and not check them and/or not fully understand what's coming back.

If you use either of those params, Jenkins will not do anything for you based on their value. You have to check them yourself and act accordingly. On the other hand, if you don't use them, Jenkins will recognize a failure code and fail the pipe if one comes back.

Think about it: If you set returnStatus, you're getting the exit code back from the step as a return value and not as something for Jenkins itself to worry about. If you set returnStdout, you're getting the stdout stream - and not any error codes or anything from stderr. So you must check the return for what you want or you will not get the behavior you are expecting.

What I've been doing for a while is actually not setting either of those params and making sure to set $ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop' at the start of any and all PowerShell scripts running in my pipes. That way any powershell failures automatically fail the pipe as expected, without having to check it.

Per the latest version of the plugin (Version 1.3 Sept 18 2015), you must use $LastExitCode to fail a build.

Version 1.3 (Sept 18 2015)

• PowerShell now runs in Non-Interactive mode to prevent interactive prompts from hanging the build
• PowerShell now runs with ExcecutionPolicy set to "Bypass" to avoid execution policy issues
• Scripts now exit with $LastExitCode, causing non-zero exit codes to mark a build as failed
• Added help and list of available environment variables (including English and French translations)

As of 1.3, the plugin will not handle exceptions such as those from missing commands. You can do this yourself with try/catch:

try
{
    asdf
}
catch
{
    write-host "Caught an exception"
    exit 1
}

See MSDN for more.