Demo Chained Freestyle Projects

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through splitting a single Freestyle Project into two separate jobs—ASCII Build Job and ASCII Test Job—and chaining them so that tests run only after a successful build. This approach improves modularity, fault isolation, and scalability of your CI pipeline.

Overview of Workflow

1. Create the Build Job

1. From the Jenkins dashboard, click New Item, enter ASCII Build Job, and select Freestyle project.
   

2. In the job’s Build section, add an Execute shell step with:

   # Build: fetch advice from ADVICESLIP API
   curl -s https://api.adviceslip.com/advice > advice.json
   cat advice.json
   

3. Save and click Build Now. A successful build shows up on the dashboard:
   

4. Inspect the workspace to confirm advice.json exists. Example content:

   {
     "slip": {
       "id": 59,
       "advice": "Don't be afraid of silly ideas."
     }
   }
   

2. Create the Test Job

1. Go back to New Item, name it ASCII Test Job, and choose Freestyle project.

2. In Build → Execute shell, add:

   # Ensure the advice has more than 5 words
   ls advice.json
   jq -r '.slip.advice' advice.json > advice.message
   
   if [ "$(wc -w < advice.message)" -gt 5 ]; then
     echo "Advice - $(cat advice.message) has more than 5 words"
   else
     echo "Advice - $(cat advice.message) has 5 words or less"
   fi
   

3. Save the job. (Currently it will fail if run alone, since advice.json is missing.)

3. Chain Jobs with Post-build Actions

Configure ASCII Build Job to trigger ASCII Test Job:

1. Open ASCII Build Job → Configure.

2. Scroll to Post-build Actions and choose Build other projects.

3. Enter ASCII Test Job and select Trigger only if build is stable.
   

4. Save and rebuild ASCII Build Job. Now the dashboard shows the downstream Test job:
   

4. Diagnose Test Failure

If ASCII Test Job fails, open its dashboard:

Inspect the console output:

Started by upstream project "ascii-build-job" build number 2
Running as SYSTEM
Building in workspace /var/lib/jenkins/workspace/ascii-test-job
[ascii-test-job] $ /bin/sh -xe /tmp/jenkins*.sh
+ ls advice.json
ls: cannot access 'advice.json': No such file or directory
Build step 'Execute shell' marked build as failure
Finished: FAILURE

The failure happens because advice.json lives only in the Build job’s workspace.

References

• Jenkins Freestyle Project
• Copy Artifact Plugin
• ADVICESLIP API Documentation