Retry failed xcodebuild test - bash

Question

I am building custom Jenkins build script (sh) for iOS app build/test checks.
But sometimes UI test fails just because of timing issue, so I want it to re run few more times to make sure the issue is real.
for (( ATTEMPT=1; ATTEMPT<=2; ATTEMPT++ ))
do
xcodebuild [flags] test #add_result_saving_mechanism
#if failed, do smth to go to next attempt. Else - break
if SOME_KIND_OF_FAIL_CHECK; then
continue
else
break
fi
fi
I used xcpretty before, so was able to read $PIPESTATUS and react accordingly, but xcpretty is crashing for xcodebuild test for some reason, so looking ways to do without it
xcodebuild [flags] test | xcpretty
STATUS="${PIPESTATUS}"
if [ "$STATUS" != "0" ]; then
FAILURE_MSG="${TARGET} (${BUILD_NAME}) failed UI/Unit testing"
#try next attempt if available
continue
else
break
fi
How can I handle these retries without pipes/xcpretty?

Answer 1

From the jenkins perspective - it always used to bail early if a script encountered an error, so you could try this type of syntax to prevent that (in the jenkins config this is, not in the script itself)
jenkins_build_script.sh || true
# continue with things...
Also, if you're having trouble capturing the failure itself - try piping the xcodebuild output to a log file and then grep-ing for the errors you're anticipating.

Answer 2

Since you said it's a script run by Jenkins you can handle the retry from Jenkins pipeline instead of inside the shell script.
As in the example from the docs
pipeline {
agent any
stages {
stage('Deploy') {
steps {
retry(3) {
sh './flakey-deploy.sh'
}
}
}
}
}
You can read about it here
Hope this will help good luck.