Configuring Manual Approval Steps in Jenkins

You may want to configure your pipeline to wait at certain points for a human to manually approve the pipeline to proceed. You can do this most simply using the input step plugin which will pauses Pipeline execution and present some configured text along with proceed and abort options:

CODE

steps {
    input message: 'Approve deployment to Production environment?'

    <manually approved steps here>
}

You can also request approval by one or more specific submitters…

CODE

stage ('Approve?')
{
    timeout(time:4, unit:'HOURS')
    {
        input message: 'Approve deployment?', submitter: MY_APPROVERS
    }
}

Note that the ability to specify a Group as a submitter is, at the time of writing, still subject to an improvement request.

You can also script a more sophisticated solution, if required. The following example script renders a drop down list from which a user can choose a deployment target:

CODE

stage ('Wait for user to specify deployment target') {
    steps {
        script {
             def userInput = input(
                 id: 'userInput', message: 'Deploy target?',
                 parameters: [[
                     $class: 'ChoiceParameterDefinition', 
                     defaultValue: 'strDef', 
                     description:'describing choices', 
                     name:'nameChoice', 
                     choices: "QA\nUAT\nProduction"
                 ]]
             )
            println(userInput); //Use this value to branch to different logic if needed
        }
    }
}

See the relevant documentation here: Pipeline: Input Step (jenkins.io)