How to enable SCM polling with the Jenkins Pipeline plugin

if you wanted to use the multi-branch pipeline plugin to create jobs automatically using a Jenkinsfile there is not a way I know of to have the "Poll SCM" option enabled in the job

Nor is any needed. Multibranch projects have a configurable polling interval for the branch indexing as a whole, which also serves as a per-branch build trigger, and will also receive webhooks automatically.

To answer the question how to enable SCM polling, you need to do the following.

Using the Pipeline Syntax generator and "properties: Set job properties" you can generate the following which will enable SCM polling.

properties([pipelineTriggers([pollSCM('H * * * *')])])

However as Jesse Glick points out for Multibranch pipelines you don't need to enable SCM polling.

I am thinking about the same problem.

If you are using a online Git service like Github or Bitbucket, I think you could use their Webhooks features to solve it. I have not been able to test the solution yet, but it should work.

In your Multibranch Pipeline configuration, enable the Trigger builds remotely option.

Then you need to enable your Github/Bitbucket Webhook on your repository, using the path (as described in the Jenkins configuration descrition): JENKINS_URL/job/test/build?token=TOKEN_NAME