Start Jenkins on Fedora 20

Installing Jenkins on Fedora 20 is quite easy thanks to the available Red Hat packages, but I ran into problems when I tried to start Jenkins. Here are the installation steps I followed:

wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/jenkins.repo http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/redhat/jenkins.repo
rpm --import http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/redhat/jenkins-ci.org.key
yum -y install jenkins
systemctl enable jenkins
systemctl start jenkins

Your first error will show up if Java isn’t installed. You can fix that by installing Java:

yum -y install java-1.7.0-openjdk-headless

After installing Java, Jenkins still refused to start. Nothing showed up in the command line or via journalctl -xn, so I jumped into the Jenkins log file (found at /var/log/jenkins/jenkins.log):

Aug 13, 2014 2:21:44 PM org.eclipse.jetty.util.log.JavaUtilLog info
INFO: jetty-8.y.z-SNAPSHOT
Aug 13, 2014 2:21:46 PM org.eclipse.jetty.util.log.JavaUtilLog info
INFO: NO JSP Support for , did not find org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet

My Java knowledge is relatively limited, so I tossed the JSP error message into Google. A stackoverflow thread was the first result and it talked about a possible misconfiguration with Jetty. I tried their trick of using the OPTIONS environment variable, but that didn’t work.

Then I realized that there wasn’t a Jetty package installed on my server. Ouch. The installation continues:

yum -y install jetty-jsp

Jenkins could now get off the ground and I saw the familiar log messages that I’m more accustomed to seeing:

Aug 13, 2014 2:24:26 PM hudson.WebAppMain$3 run
INFO: Jenkins is fully up and running

Much of these problems could stem from the fact that Jenkins RPM’s are built to suit a wide array of system versions and the dependencies aren’t configured correctly. My hope is that the Jenkins project for Fedora 21 will alleviate some of these problems and give the user a better experience.