How to change home directory of Jenkins?

Question

Simple question: How to change the jenkins home directory location? By default it points to /var/lib/jenkins whereas I want it to point to /home/jenkins. I have changed my $JENKINS_HOME to /home/jenkins but it doesn't help me.

Answer 1

To change the Jenkins home directory you just need to setup the "JENKINS_HOME" environment variable to point to the new location. You can also set the JENKINS_HOME as a system property or a JNDI environment entry as explained in the documentation.

Jenkins Documentation

Answer 2

I tried setting the PATH thing but it doesn't seem to work as it probably has to be under Jenkins user which does not have a real unix user account. I found the variable also accessible in /etc/sysconfig/jenkins which did the trick when I restarted Jenkins.

Answer 3

Jenkins usually runs with its own user,
so changing the home-dir of that user should do the job.

If not sure, simply run a test-job with a shell-command like 'id' or 'whoami' or 'env' to find the user that Jenkins uses.

Also, note that a message of "Started by user anonymous" does not mean that Jenkins started as an anonymous user -
please see this related answers by Sagar and Peter Tran:

how to run jenkins as a different user

Answer 4

For me on Jenkins 2.7.2 on RHEL 7.2 after already starting jenkins and configuring a build, I needed to:

1) Change the jenkins user's home directory

sudo su -
service jenkins stop
vi /etc/passwd
#  change the /var/lib/jenkins to /home/jenkins or whatever 

2) Change the setting in the start script to also find it

vi /etc/sysconfig/jenkins
#   change the JENKINS_HOME to /home/jenkins or what ever

3) Copy all the data to the new location (eg: /home/jenkins)

cd /home
cp -Rf /var/lib/jenkins .
chown -R jenkins:jenkins *

4) Start it back up

service jenkins start

And that seems to have done it for me.