Shared libraries "vars" folder structure - can I add subfolders?

Question

From Extending with Shared Libraries - Directory structure I created a shared library where I have multiple *.groovy files implementing global variables in the vars folder.

Can I add subfolders to vars to organize better my files? I tried, with no luck at the moment of consuming the global variable. Is there a specific syntax I need to use to reference a file in a subfolder? or subfolder are just not supported?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, no, you cannot. There is a declined improvement request at Jenkins' issue tracker. The given reason is that filenames are mapped directly to variable names.

Other approaches typical in Groovy like

evaluate(new File("../tools/Tools.groovy"))

do not work as well, because the Jenkins global vars files are not native Groovy code but processed.

However, there is something you can use to better organize helper functions for those which are not custom pipeline steps.

I have an includes.groovy file containing different functions like

def doSomething() {
}

def doSomethingElse() {
}

In a customPipelineStep.groovy file I can then access them with

def call() {
  includes.doSomethingElse()
}

So includes works somehow like a namespace, and you could have multiple such utility files. They are no folders, but help organizing stuff.

Instead of defining custom steps in individual files, you could also group them together in files, but then you would have to wrap them in a script block within your pipeline to access them, as pointed out in the documentation. In the same way, include-functions are also publicly available in script-blocks, so be aware that they are not private.