Run same pipeline in parallel in Jenkins

Question

I am relatively new to Jenkins. I created a declarative pipeline in Jenkins where users are asked to enter their branch name and then Jenkins builds that specific branch (for example, origin/mybranch). This allows me to run a quick set of tests for specific branches.

The developers can run the pipeline multiple times and today I block multiple such pipelines from running simultaneously because if they do, one overwrites the other.

This happens because the first pipeline writes to c:\Jenkins\workspace\QuickBuild and when another such job run is writes to that exact same folder, killing the original run.

Blocking was the solution I found to prevent this but I would like it so that when one run is finishing up (using less than 8 cores) the next run in queue will already start running with whatever cores are freed up.

I would have though this would be a basic concept of Jenkins. Am I missing something? Am I doing it wrong?

Answer 1

Following MaratC and Zett42's suggestions, I ended up adding this to my script:

    agent
    {
        node {
            customWorkspace "${params.Branch}"
        }
    }

This causes Jenkins to create each build in a different folder and they don't step on each others' toes.

The only downside is that you can't build the same branch simultaneously but that's a corner case. Also, I could add a random number to the workspace to enable this as well.