Although, the coding language used here is groovy but Jenkins does not allow us to use Groovy to its fullest,  so we can say that Jenkins Pipelines are not exactly groovy. Classes that you may write in src, they are processed in a “special Jenkins way” and you have no control over this. Depending on the various scenarios objects in Groovy don’t behave as you would expect objects to work.

Our thought is putting all pipeline functions in vars is much more practical approach, while there is no other good way to do inheritance, we wanted to use Jenkins Pipelines the right way but it has turned out to be far more practical to use vars for global functions.

Practical Strategy
As we know Jenkins Pipeline’s shared library support allows us to define and develop a set of shared pipeline helpers in this repository and provides a straightforward way of using those functions in a Jenkinsfile.This simple example will just illustrate how you can provide input to a pipeline with a simple YAML file so you can centralize all of your pipelines into one library. The Jenkins shared library example:And the example app that uses it:

Directory Structure

You would have the following folder structure in a git repo:

└── vars
    ├── opstreePipeline.groovy
    ├── opstreeStatefulPipeline.groovy
    ├── opstreeStubsPipeline.groovy
    └── pipelineConfig.groovy

Setting up Library in Jenkins Console.

This repo would be configured in under Manage Jenkins > Configure System in the Global Pipeline Libraries section. In that section Jenkins requires you give this library a Name. Example opstree-library

Pipeline.yaml

Let’s assume that project repository would have a pipeline.yaml file in the project root that would provide input to the pipeline:Pipeline.yaml

ENVIRONMENT_NAME: test
SERVICE_NAME: opstree-service
DB_PORT: 3079
REDIS_PORT: 6079

Jenkinsfile

Then, to utilize the shared pipeline library, the Jenkinsfile in the root of the project repo would look like:

@Library ('opstree-library@master') _
opstreePipeline()

PipelineConfig.groovy

So how does it all work? First, the following function is called to get all of the configuration data from the pipeline.yaml file:

def call() {
  Map pipelineConfig = readYaml(file: "${WORKSPACE}/pipeline.yaml")
  return pipelineConfig
}

opstreePipeline.groovy

You can see the call to this function in opstreePipeline(), which is called by the Jenkinsfile.

def call() {
    node('Slave1') {

        stage('Checkout') {
            checkout scm
        }

         def p = pipelineConfig()

        stage('Prerequistes'){
            serviceName = sh (
                    script: "echo ${p.SERVICE_NAME}|cut -d '-' -f 1",
                    returnStdout: true
                ).trim()
        }

        stage('Build & Test') {
                sh "mvn --version"
                sh "mvn -Ddb_port=${p.DB_PORT} -Dredis_port=${p.REDIS_PORT} clean install"
        }

        stage ('Push Docker Image') {
            docker.withRegistry('https://registry-opstree.com', 'dockerhub') {
                sh "docker build -t opstree/${p.SERVICE_NAME}:${BUILD_NUMBER} ."
                sh "docker push opstree/${p.SERVICE_NAME}:${BUILD_NUMBER}"
            }
        }

        stage ('Deploy') {
            echo "We are going to deploy ${p.SERVICE_NAME}"
            sh "kubectl set image deployment/${p.SERVICE_NAME} ${p.SERVICE_NAME}=opstree/${p.SERVICE_NAME}:${BUILD_NUMBER} "
            sh "kubectl rollout status deployment/${p.SERVICE_NAME} -n ${p.ENVIRONMENT_NAME} "

    }
}

You can see the logic easily here. The pipeline is checking if the developer wants to deploy on which environment what db_port needs to be there.

Benefits

The benefits of this approach are many, some of them are as mentioned below:

• How to write groovy code is now none of the developer’s perspective.
• Structure of the Pipeline.yaml is really flexible, where entire data structures can be passed as input to the pipeline.
• Code redundancy saved to a large extent.

 Jenkinsfiles could actually just look more commonly, like this:

@Library ('opstree-library@master') _
opstreePipeline()

and opstreePipeline() would just read the the project type from pipeline.yaml and dynamically run the exact function, like opstreeStatefulPipeline(), opstreeStubsPipeline.groovy() . since pipeline are not exactly groovy, this isn’t possible. So one of the drawback is that each project would have to have a different-looking Jenkinsfile. The solution is in progress!So, what do you think?

Reference links: 
Image: Google image search (jenkins.io)