jenkins gradle can't find groovy-all-2.5.5.jar - groovy

Question

Have a Jenkins Pipeline that downloads a testing repo from bitbucket then does the following:
gradle build --refresh-dependencies
One of the dependencies is as follows:
compile 'org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-all:2.5.5'
We have the Pipeline running every 30min, and at least 3-4 times a day a build will fail with the following error:
Could not determine artifacts for org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-all:2.5.5
> Could not get resource '<pathToResource>/org/codehaus/groovy/groovy-all/2.5.5/grovy-all-2.5.5.jar'.
> Could not HEAD '<pathToResource>/org/codehaus/groovy/groovy-all/2.5.5/grovy-all-2.5.5.jar'.
> Read timed out
I've tried upgrading the version of groovy-all, as well as specifying the ext/type as pom. When specifying the type I get a new error as follows:
> Cannot infer Groovy class path because no Groovy Jar was found on class path:
As I said this only happens about 3-4 times a day, out of 48 builds a day, so it's very inconsistent and happens at random intervals.
We can't revert groovy-all to a previous version where the .jar exists, so is there any solution to resolve this?

Answer 1

You say the problem is intermittent so it sounds like you are timing out when downloading the artefact. Are you caching it locally (Artifactory, Nexus or similar)? If not, look into doing so. If you are caching locally, I'd check if something is flushing the cache