[continuous-integration] How to run jenkins as a different user

I have been trying to follow tutorials and this one: Deploy as Jenkins User or Allow Jenkins To Run As Different User?

but I still can't for the love of the computing gods, run as a different user. Here are the steps of what I did:

  1. download the macosx pkg for jenkins(LTS)
  2. setup plugins etc and git
  3. try to build it

I keep getting a can't clone error because jenkins keeps starting as anonymous:

Started by user anonymous

How do I set it up so that jenkins runs as me? I was using the jenkins web UI so it was in localhost:8080

I tried logging in also using /login but I can't even login using my name or as root.

The people tab doesn't even have a create user link, so yeah I've been stuck. Help please?

This question is related to continuous-integration jenkins

The answer is


On Mac OS X, the way I enabled Jenkins to pull from my (private) Github repo is:

First, ensure that your user owns the Jenkins directory

sudo chown -R me:me /Users/Shared/Jenkins

Then edit the LaunchDaemon plist for Jenkins (at /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.jenkins-ci.plist) so that your user is the GroupName and the UserName:

    <key>GroupName</key>
    <string>me</string>
...
    <key>UserName</key>
    <string>me</string>

Then reload Jenkins:

sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.jenkins-ci.plist
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.jenkins-ci.plist

Then Jenkins, since it's running as you, has access to your ~/.ssh directory which has your keys.


The "Issue 2" answer given by @Sagar works for the majority of git servers such as gitorious.

However, there will be a name clash in a system like gitolite where the public ssh keys are checked in as files named with the username, ie keydir/jenkins.pub. What if there are multiple jenkins servers that need to access the same gitolite server?

(Note: this is about running the Jenkins daemon not running a build job as a user (addressed by @Sagar's "Issue 1").)

So in this case you do need to run the Jenkins daemon as a different user.

There are two steps:

Step 1

The main thing is to update the JENKINS_USER environment variable. Here's a patch showing how to change the user to ptran.

BEGIN PATCH
--- etc/default/jenkins.old     2011-10-28 17:46:54.410305099 -0700
+++ etc/default/jenkins 2011-10-28 17:47:01.670369300 -0700
@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@
 PIDFILE=/var/run/jenkins/jenkins.pid

 # user id to be invoked as (otherwise will run as root; not wise!)
-JENKINS_USER=jenkins
+JENKINS_USER=ptran

 # location of the jenkins war file
 JENKINS_WAR=/usr/share/jenkins/jenkins.war
--- etc/init.d/jenkins.old      2011-10-28 17:47:20.878539172 -0700
+++ etc/init.d/jenkins  2011-10-28 17:47:47.510774714 -0700
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@

 #DAEMON=$JENKINS_SH
 DAEMON=/usr/bin/daemon
-DAEMON_ARGS="--name=$NAME --inherit --env=JENKINS_HOME=$JENKINS_HOME --output=$JENKINS_LOG -   -pidfile=$PIDFILE" 
+DAEMON_ARGS="--name=$JENKINS_USER --inherit --env=JENKINS_HOME=$JENKINS_HOME --output=$JENKINS_LOG --pidfile=$PIDFILE" 

 SU=/bin/su
END PATCH

Step 2

Update ownership of jenkins directories:

chown -R ptran /var/log/jenkins
chown -R ptran /var/lib/jenkins
chown -R ptran /var/run/jenkins
chown -R ptran /var/cache/jenkins

Step 3

Restart jenkins

sudo service jenkins restart

you can integrate to LDAP or AD as well. It works well.


If you really want to run Jenkins as you, I suggest you check out my Jenkins.app. An alternative, easy way to run Jenkins on Mac.

See https://github.com/stisti/jenkins-app/

Download it from https://github.com/stisti/jenkins-app/downloads