Question

Our team is sharing a Jenkins server with other teams, and this currently means that we are sharing the same OS-level build-user account. The different teams’ OS-level build-user settings (Maven settings, bash settings, user-level Ant libraries, etc…) have collided a few times–“fixing” the settings for one team’s jobs inadvertently “breaks” another team’s jobs. The easiest sol’n that occurs to me is giving each team its own OS-level build-user account with which to execute its Jenkins jobs–but I cannot find a way to do this.

I have checked with Google, and also here

https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Use+Jenkins

and here

https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Plugins

to no avail.

Is there a way to do this? If not, can you recommend any best practices for segregating sets of builds from one another?

Answer 1

Maven Specific

You have two options that come to mind,

1. Add additional installations of Maven into your Jenkins global configuration, each using their own Home directory, and thus settings files. This will allow you to use totally different version of Maven, and selected based on Job requirements (You are given the option to select which “version” of maven you wish to use on the job itself.
2. Similar to (1), but specify specific settings configurations using Maven command line arguments. Its a little less “obvious” but may be quicker to implement

Multi-slave

You could possibly make use of multiple slaves on each machine. It increases the overheads of the builds quite significantly, and the implementation is such that you’d have multiple user accounts on a machine, each setup as needed, and then one slave instance for each user.

I’m not sure these solutions will totally answer your problem, I’ll have a think and see if anything else pops into mind, but it might give some starting points