Fetch tags when cloning repo

Graham Hay

I recently moved a freestyle Jenkins job to (multibranch) pipeline, and discovered that there was a subtle change in behaviour in the checkout being made. Before:

git fetch --tags --force --progress -- git@github.com:*** +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* # timeout=10

And after:

git fetch --no-tags --force --progress -- https://github.com/*** +refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master # timeout=10

The important difference here being the --no-tags. This is probably a sensible default for most use cases (i.e. a faster clone), but this job was using semantic-release; which needs the tags.

It’s relatively simple to fix this in the ui, you can add an “advanced clone behaviours” block, and tick a box:

But this job is created using the Job DSL, and I couldn’t see any easy way to add that to the branchSource. In the end, I changed the checkout step from:

stage('Checkout') {
            steps {
                checkout scm
            }
}

to:

checkout scmGit(
                    branches: scm.branches,
                    extensions: [cloneOption(noTags: false, reference: '', shallow: false)],
                    userRemoteConfigs: scm.userRemoteConfigs
                )

Leave a comment