Friday, March 9, 2012

Jenkins: OSX installer now supports the creation of it's own jenkins user

Okay, this doesn't sound like big thing, but there were some valid complaints from users that used jenkins to run their iOS and maven builds. Some of them had trouble with ssh. See https://ljnelson.posterous.com/getting-jenkins-running-on-a-mac and http://colonelpanic.net/2011/06/jenkins-on-mac-os-x-git-w-ssh-public-key.

Since jenkins version 1.449, the OSX installer provides an option to run the jenkins service no longer as daemon user. The installer is able to create a new jenkins user with it's own home directory (maven and ssh, here we come!). It should be easier to grant the jenkins user access to the keychain to allow codesigning of iOS deliverables.

Some facts about the new jenkins user:
  • uid will be determined automatically to avoid any collisions with existing users
  • guid of jenkins group is determined automatically to avoid collisions with existing groups
  • home directory of the jenkins user will be /Users/Shared/Jenkins
Installer options


How to get rid of the jenkins installation?
I heard people talking about issues with the installer updating an existing installation (how can this be?). Some of them asked for way to get rid of the installed files. Since OSX doesn't have a mechanism to un-install files, there are only the options to remove the files manually or use some 3rd party tool (TrashMe) to get rid of the files. Since these tools use some heuristic methods to determine the files to remove, I created a simple shell script to remove all files installed by the installer. The script can be found here.
Warning: I used the script for testing purpose when experimenting with the installer. The are no error checks and it's far from being perfect. So, please use at your own risk!

6 comments:

Ali Servet Donmez said...

Well you didn't answer to my comment on your previous Jenkins post, so here I am, again ;-)

Please keep in mind keychain access issue when you daemonize or run as a specific user. Jenkins on Mac is useful particularly for iOS developers and keychain access has always been a major issue for me. Keep up the good work, thank you!

t0r0X said...

Current versions of Jenkins contain a uninstall script. See this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11608996/how-to-uninstall-jenkins

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