how to copy files from a directory outside the workspace to workspace in Jenkins pipeline

Question

I'm starting with Jenkins pipelines, and I want to copy some video files from outside any jenkins directory to my job workspace directory. I'm using the File Operations Plugin to perform some file operations for other jobs I have. With that plugin, I'm able to copy files from inside my workspace to outside:

fileOperations([fileCopyOperation(excludes: '', flattenFiles: false, includes: "videos\\*.MTS", targetLocation: "H:\\home\\Videos")])

With this step, for example, I can copy 4 video files located in my workspace to the mentioned directory, located in another disk.

But I want to do the opposite. I want to copy video files from a source directory in the other disk to the workspace. I tried it in several ways, but seems that 'includes' field doesn't accept absolute paths. For example:

fileOperations([fileCopyOperation(excludes: '', flattenFiles: false, includes: "H:\\home\\Videos\\videos\\*.MTS", targetLocation: ".")])

This returned the following error in the console output:

File Copy Operation: FATAL: Expecting Ant GLOB pattern, but saw 'H:\home\Videos\videos\*.MTS'. See http://ant.apache.org/manual/Types/fileset.html for syntax

So, i'm stuck trying to carry some files to the workspace directory in order to be processed there.

Note: I'm using a declarative pipeline for my job.

Answer 1

In fact, seems that the problem is not copying files from outside the workspace but from outside the current working dir. I still don't know how to do this.

But, you can change the current working dir to be the one that contains files you want to copy, so:

dir("H:\\home\\Videos\\videos") {
    fileOperations([fileCopyOperation(excludes: '', flattenFiles: true, includes: '*.MTS', targetLocation: "${WORKSPACE}")])
}

This code allows you to copy mts files placed in the mentioned directory in the workspace dir. You can see additional help for the dir step here

Answer 2

When I tried the accepted answer, I stopped getting the error but the file was not copied to my workspace and since there was no error, I got no information as to why.

Anyway what worked for me was to just run a 'powershell' step and use the command 'copy' since I'm working on Windows, and if you are in Linux you can use the step 'sh' instead.

e.g.

powershell 'copy "${source}" ${filename}'