Moving Jenkins user home directory

Jenkins is a continuous integration (CI) / continuous delivery (CD) platform consisting of a Jenkins master - essentially a controller - which launches jobs on Jenkins slaves. Often slaves are controlled via SSH.

Recently I ran into an issue with a legacy Jenkins slave where the “jenkins” where Puppet tried to enforce the home directory of “jenkins” to be /home/jenkins instead of /var/lib/jenkins:

Error: Could not set home on user[jenkins]: Execution of '/usr/sbin/usermod -d /home/jenkins jenkins' returned 8: usermod: user jenkins is currently used by p rocess 802  

The usermod command failed because several Jenkins processes (ssh-agent, Java) locked the user from modification. The solution was relatively straightforward:

• Mark slave as offline from Jenkins master
• pkill jenkins
• run puppet (sets correct home directory)
• mv /var/lib/jenkins /home/
• Change slave directory to /home/jenkins on the Jenkins master
• Mark slave as online on Jenkins master
• Start slave from Jenkins master

• Hints-and-Tips

• Jenkins
• Puppet