How to Change abortPrevious Value in Jenkins?

Background

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In our Jenkins pipeline, we use the following configuration to manage resource consumption, especially for builds that typically take more than 30 minutes to complete:

disableConcurrentBuilds abortPrevious: true

This setting prevents concurrent builds on the same branch or pull request. When a new build is triggered while a previous one is still running, the older build is automatically aborted.

This helps conserve resources and avoids redundant builds when developers push multiple updates shortly after opening a pull request.

The problem

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But the problem is:

Sometimes, during merges, an ongoing build gets aborted midway or near completion because a new build was triggered for the same branch. They requested that if a build is already running, new builds triggered on the same branch should wait in the queue instead of aborting the current build.

Before the changes:

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Let’s take a picture bellow of the release/x.x.x branch.

• Job #104 was aborted because a new merge was triggered on the release/x.x.x branch.
• Job #105 was also aborted for the same reason, due to another new merge on the release/x.x.x branch.

After the changes:

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• Job #106 will continue running without being canceled, even if a new merge occurs.
• Job #107 will wait in the queue until Job #106 finishes before starting.

Initial Thoughts

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Initially, I believed that disableConcurrentBuilds was a global setting that applied uniformly across all branches and pull requests.

After researching via ChatGPT and Google, I found that selectively applying this setting per branch is not straightforward and requires adding complexity to the existing pipeline.

The Solution

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But there is a simple solution? Yes!

I implemented and tested conditional logic that:

• Retains abortPrevious: true for pull request builds,
• Disables it for specific branches such as devel and release.

Here the code snap about how to implement it.

// vars/build.groovy
def call() {
    def isAboutPrevious = true

    if (env.BRANCH_NAME == 'devel' || env.BRANCH_NAME.startsWith('release/')) {
        isAboutPrevious = false // disable abortPrevious for devel and release branches.
    }

    pipeline {
        options {
            disableConcurrentBuilds abortPrevious: isAboutPrevious
        }
        stages{
            // ....
        }
    }
}

The Result

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The changes passed testing and have been merged into our shared pipeline library.

Now, for the devel and release branches in multi-branch pipeline:

• Jenkins no longer aborts running builds when new builds are triggered.
• Instead, it queues subsequent builds, improving stability and predictability for our QA workflows.

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