Cloudbees Jenkins job cannot install packages via Yum

Question

I have Jenkins running on a Cloudbees Fedora 17 node. I need my job to be able to install certain packages to build my project correctly for deployment but my yum install commands fail because the jenkins user does not have the correct permissions.

I cannot SSH into the box or use the jenkins CLI to assign root permissions to use sudo and Cloudbees doesn't appear to enable the Script Console. Neither can I run the yum command as with su because it expects the administrator password which I cannot enter remotely.

What can I do?

Answer 1

This is the problem with hosted solutions like what Cloudbees offers. If you need access to operating system level permissions on the host server, then you have little choice but to host Jenkins yourself, or to obtain a different licensing structure with CloudBees in order to have a VPS, or some other isolated but still SaaS hosted solution.

Answer 2

I am not aware that you can install additional software on the CloudBees Jenkins master node. But you can request from CloudBees support that additional software packages will be installed on the automatically created CloudBees build nodes.

As alternative you can also create your own build nodes (called OPE in CloudBees). This is helpful for a lot of cases such as specific software requirements (such as closed source software which requires a license) or just to be much more flexible when it comes to require packages installed on it.

Since you didn't mention what kind of packages are missing: There are a lot of frameworks that provide much more ruby, java, python, go etc. versions as any Linux distribution. CloudBees provides documentation for a lot of them on http://dev-at-cloud-docs.cloudbees.com/docs/dev-at-cloud-docs-1.1/Build+Tools.html