Reading an environment variable set by a test in Jenkins pipeline - node.js

Question

Not found any reference to this particular question.
I am looking to find a way to achieve something like this in a Jenkins pipeline which runs our acceptance tests using Protractor and Cucumber.js:
steps {
container('selenium') {
script {
try {
{
//run tests
}
}
catch (err) {
if (env.testFailed == 'true') {
println "A test failure exists - build status updated to failure"
currentBuild.result = 'FAILURE'
error "Test(s) have failed"
}
else {
println "No test failures exist - build status updated to success"
currentBuild.result = 'SUCCESS'
}
}
}
}
}
This would fail the build if the env var of testFailed is 'true'. The reason for this is we are encountering bugs with Protractor-Cucumber framework where if a failed test retries and passes the exit code of the stage is still 1.
So in the After hook of each test I am setting the env var using node.js to true if the Scenario status is failed:
if (scenario.result.status === Status.FAILED) {
process.env.testFailed = 'true';
}
if (scenario.result.status === Status.PASSED) {
process.env.testFailed = 'false';
}
The problem I have found is that the Jenkins pipeline fails to read the env var value in the code block of the catch section. It is always null.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

1) change the After hook to write the true/false flag to a file in sync.
2) read the file in catch block
catch(err) {
testFailed = sh(script:'cat result.flag.txt', returnStdout: true).trim()
if(testFailed == 'true') {
...
}
}
Another option if there is total/passed/failed case number in output of npm test
lines = []
try {
lines = sh(script:'npm test', returnStdout: true).readLines();
}
catch(err) {
size = lines.size()
// parse the last 20 lines to extract fail/pass/total number
for(int i=size-20;i<size;i++) {
line[i]
}
}

Answer 2

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK NOW?
I see that you're running your tests in a container. When you set an environment variable, it's reflected on the scope of your container not the Jenkins master server
WHAT YOU COULD TRY TO DO
This actually depends on how you run the tests, but this should be an option
// run tests here
// you should have a variable for your container
def exit_code = sh(script: "sudo docker inspect ${container.id} --format='{{.State.ExitCode}}'", returnStdout: true)
sh "exit ${exit_code}"
This actually also depends how you start the tests inside the container,
So if you update your answer with this information I could help you