What are "Branch indexing" activities in Jenkins BlueOcean

Question

I'm setting a Multi-Branch pipeline in jenkins blue ocean. Everything is starting to work nice.

One thing I've noticed is that once a while, I get an execution of the job named: "Branch indexing" running.

My build contains some heavy unit testing and code coverage, that take ~4h30 to be executed, so having this job randomly executed 2 times is not really good(not even taking in account that we have 6-8 active branches, so it would mean that the executions will only stacks.

So:

1) What are those executions? 2) Is this absolutely required? 3) Can I disable it?

Dowry

Branch indexing discovers new or deleted branches. In the job configuration (Branch Sources > Property strategy), you can activate Suppress automatic SCM triggering, which will not automatically build new branches. – Highbred

But this is not a new branch, I'm talking about develop that have been build 2h before it has been triggered. – Dowry

And it says something like "triggered by branch indexing"? – Highbred

The other builds have the name of the last commit. This one has just "Branch indexing" as title, so I guess. – Dowry

Did you figure this out? I'm having the same issue, trying to disable this "Branch Indexing". I asked a Q here #54334758 – Ditzel

@Ditzel unfortunately no :( – Dowry

It's probably this Scan Organization Triggers or Child Scan Triggers, from the explanation, it said This trigger allows for a periodic fallback, but when necessary. If no indexing has been performed in the specified interval, then an indexing will be scheduled. – Mussolini

Answer 1

In Jenkins, we can create a stage to abort branch indexing.

stage('Branch indexing: abort') {
            when {
                allOf {
                    triggeredBy cause: "BranchIndexingCause"
                    not { 
                        changeRequest() 
                    }
                }
            }
            steps {
                script {
                    echo "Branch discovered by branch indexing"
                    currentBuild.result = 'SUCCESS' 
                    error "Caught branch indexing..."
                }
            }
        }

Thalia

You're explaining what the 'branch indexing' is though? – Hightoned