How do you adjust a timeout when `timeout()` isn't working?

Question

I noticed that in my Jenkins pipeline, cloning a git repo automatically times out after 10 minutes. According to the Jenkins pipeline documentation and another Stack Overflow question, you can set the timeout by using a timeout step or by adding timeout to your pipeline options.

My Jenkinsfile.groovy contains the following:

timeout(time: 60, unit: 'MINUTES') {
    dir('repo-name') {
        git branch: 'branch-name', url: 'https://github.com/repo-name.git'
    }
}

But when I run the Jenkins job, the command times out after 10 minutes. I checked the console, and when the repo was being cloned, it showed a comment # timeout=10.

Why didn't the timeout change here?

Answer 1

After many frustrating hours of troubleshooting, I discovered that Jenkins has a handy groovy snippet generator: if you're hosting Jenkins on http://localhost:8080, just go to http://localhost:8080/pipeline-syntax and you can plug in any step to get the same functionality in groovy script format.

Using this tool, I generated an entirely different command to clone the repo:

checkout([
    $class: 'GitSCM',
    branches: [[name: 'branch-name']],
    extensions: [[$class: 'CheckoutOption', timeout: 60]],
    userRemoteConfigs: [[url: 'https://github.com/repo-name.git']],
])

I'm guessing that in my Jenkins, the default git checkout timeout was set to 10 minutes at some point, and this command is the only way to change it.