The agent section specifies where the entire pipeline or a specific stage will be executed within the Jenkins environment, depending on where this agent section is placed. This section must be defined at the top level of the pipeline block, but its use at the stage level is optional. For more information, please refer to the Jenkins official documentation.

Built-in podTemplate

A podTemplate is a Pod template used to create an Agent. You can define a podTemplate for use with the Kubernetes plugin.

During pipeline execution, each Jenkins Agent Pod must have a container named jnlp to enable communication between the Jenkins Controller and the Jenkins Agent. Additionally, you can add containers to the podTemplate to meet personalized requirements. You can optionally use a custom Pod YAML to flexibly control the runtime environment and switch containers using the container command. Here is a related example.

pipeline {
  agent {
    kubernetes {
      //cloud 'kubernetes'
      label 'mypod'
      yaml """
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
spec:
  containers:
  - name: maven
    image: maven:3.3.9-jdk-8-alpine
    command: ['cat']
    tty: true
"""
    }
  }
  stages {
    stage('Run maven') {
      steps {
        container('maven') {
          sh 'mvn -version'
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

In the current version, KubeSphere has a built-in podTemplate: base, which provides an isolated Docker environment within the Pod.

You can use the built-in podTemplate by specifying the Agent’s label. For example, to use the podTemplate for nodejs, specify the label as nodejs when creating the pipeline. Please refer to the following example.

pipeline {
  agent {
    node {
      label 'nodejs'
    }
  }

  stages {
    stage('nodejs hello') {
      steps {
        container('nodejs') {
          sh 'yarn -v'
          sh 'node -v'
          sh 'docker version'
          sh 'docker images'
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

  • podTemplate base

    Name Type/Version

    Jenkins Agent Label

    base, go, java, jdk, maven, nodejs, etc.

    Container Name

    base

    Operating System

    Ubuntu 24.04

    Docker

    Latest stable version

    Helm

    Latest stable version

    Kubectl

    Latest stable version

    Built-in Tools

    unzip, which, make, wget, zip, bzip2, git