How to run jenkins as a different user

Question

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 computi

Answer 1

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