How to limit Jenkins concurrent multibranch pipeline builds?

Question

I am looking at limiting the number of concurrent builds to a specific number in Jenkins, leveraging the multibranch pipeline workflow but haven't found any good way to do this in the docs or google.

Some docs say this can be accomplished using concurrency in the stage step of a Jenkinsfile but I've also read elsewhere that that is a deprecated way of doing it.

It looks like there was something released fairly recently for limiting concurrency via Job Properties but I couldn't find documentation for it and I'm having trouble following the code. The only thing I found a PR that shows the following:

properties([concurrentBuilds(false)])

But I am having trouble getting it working.

Does anybody know or have a good example of how to limit the number of concurrent builds for a given, multibranch project? Maybe a Jenkinsfile snippet that shows how to limit or cap the number of multibranch concurrent builds?

Answer 1

Found what I was looking for. You can limit the concurrent builds using the following block in your Jenkinsfile.

node {
  // This limits build concurrency to 1 per branch
  properties([disableConcurrentBuilds()])
  
  //do stuff
  ...
}

The same can be achieved with a declarative syntax:

pipeline {
    options {
        disableConcurrentBuilds()
    }
}