Jenkins / Hudson environment variables

I am running Jenkins from user jenkins thats has $PATH set to something and when I go into Jenkins web interface, in the System Properties window (http://$host/systemInfo) I see a different $PATH.

I have installed Jenkins on Centos with the native rpm from Jenkins website. I am using the startup script provided with the installation using sudo /etc/init.d/jenkins start

Can anyone please explain to me why that happens?


Michael,

Two things:

When Jenkins connects to a computer, it goes to the sh shell, and not the bash shell (at least this is what I have noticed - I may be wrong). So any changes you make to $PATH in your bashrc file are not considered.

Also, any changes you make to $PATH in your local shell (one that you personally ssh into) will not show up in Jenkins.

To change the path that Jenkins uses, you have two options (AFAIK):

1) Edit your /etc/profile file and add the paths that you want there

2) Go to the configuration page of your slave, and add environment variable PATH, with value: $PATH:/followed-by/paths/you/want/to/add

If you use the second option, your System Information will still not show it, but your builds will see the added paths.


I kept running into this problem, but now I just add:

source /etc/profile

As the first step in my build process. Now all my subsequent rules are loaded for Jenkins to operate smoothly.


You can also edit the /etc/sysconfig/jenkins file to make any changes to the environment variables, etc. I simply added source /etc/profile to the end of the file. /etc/profile has all all of the proper PATH variables setup. When you do this, make sure you restart Jenkins

/etc/init.d/jenkins restart

We are running ZendServer CE which installs pear, phing, etc in a different path so this was helpful. Also, we don't get the LD_LIBRARY_PATH errors we used to get with Oracle client and Jenkins.


I tried /etc/profile, ~/.profile and ~/.bash_profile and none of those worked. I found that editing ~/.bashrc for the jenkins slave account did.