How to Abort Older Builds With the milestone Step in Jenkins

The milestone step aborts any earlier build that has not yet passed the same milestone when a newer build reaches it.

Place a milestone step early in the pipeline. When a newer build passes that milestone, Jenkins aborts older builds still behind it. Pair with disableConcurrentBuilds for stricter serialization.

Steps

• Add a milestone() step at the start of the pipeline.
• A newer build passing the milestone aborts older builds behind it.
• Add options { disableConcurrentBuilds() } to fully serialize a branch.

Jenkinsfile

pipeline {
  agent any
  options { disableConcurrentBuilds() }
  stages {
    stage('Guard') {
      steps { milestone(ordinal: 1) }
    }
    stage('Build') {
      steps { sh 'make build' }
    }
  }
}

Gotchas

• milestone only aborts builds that started earlier and have not yet reached it.
• For deploy stages you usually want serialization, not aborting work mid-release.

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