Silent failure with missing artifact during publish to DependencyTrack

[putz612]

I have added the publish to DependencyTrack to my pipeline however during testing I noticed that if it could not find the artifact the build would fail in the console output it would not really state that it was a hard failure. Looking at the pipeline steps every stage would show success making harder to determine the cause of the failure.

From the logs

........
[Pipeline] dependencyTrackPublisher
[DependencyTrack] Publishing artifact to Dependency-Track
[DependencyTrack] The specified artifact does not exist
........
Finished: FAILURE

[jeremylong]

This ticket should probably be opened on the dependency-track project: https://github.com/DependencyTrack/dependency-track

--Jeremy

[putz612]

Do they manage the dependency-check upload to dependency-track portion if the Jenkins plugin because the issue is somewhere in that process. I am unsure who owns that portion of code being that the dependencyTrackPublisher step in my Jenkinsfile comes from the dependency-check plugin.

[stevespringett]

The Dependency-Track publisher is part https://github.com/jenkinsci/dependency-check-plugin

However, I don't think there's a whole lot that can be done to improve this issue. Plugins have the ability to set the build status to:

• SUCCESS
• UNSTABLE
• FAILURE
• NOT_BUILT
• ABORTED

If the dependency-check report specified in the job config doesn't exist when it attempts to upload it to Dependency-Track, the plugin will log The specified artifact does not exist to the console and set the build to FAILURE. The issue you're describing seems to be more of a Jenkins usability issue. There should be a better way to find out which step in the pipeline had an issue, and I agree.

If there are other things that can be done in the plugin to improve visibility into which step caused the issue, please open a PR and submit an issue to https://issues.jenkins-ci.org.

[putz612]

Is there a way to fail the step vs the build so you can see where the failure is? I was using the verbiage described in another plugin that users were reporting similar results. Probably the best known is in archiveArtifacts on https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-38005

There is two PR with different ways of failing the step and/or better log messages. Not very good at Java but I will try to see what I can do to help.
jenkinsci/jenkins#2823