8

I have installed Jenkins on a Centos VM as I am looking at replacing Bamboo, I have it all up and running by following the install instructions. That went fine, I then wanted to spin up a Slave, I created a second VM, created a user on it, created a SSH key for that user. I then created a Slave node in Jenkins but when I created the account in Jenkins for the Slave machine and supplied the SSH Private key I got and error. Which is right as I did not put the Master SSH pub key on the Slave in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.

It looks like the Centos Yum install does not create ssh keys for the user running Jenkins, I did my Google fu and from what I read I need this to do what I want to do. I did try SU as the on the machine but with no luck. I would like to know how I need to do this, as I would sooner use SSH keys.

In saying all of this I have got a slave going by using the SSH option using a password, it works but it's not the way I want to do this.

Any help would be super!

2 Answers 2

4

I just had the same problem. What I did was:

  1. On the master change to root user: su root
  2. Execute: passwd jenkins
  3. Specify a password for the jenkins user
  4. Change to the jenkins user (and supply password from step 3): su jenkins
  5. Run ssh-keygen

That solved the problem for me. I could not do sudo passwd jenkins, I had to change to the root user. You might also want to add the remote server to the know_hosts file.

1
  • Hi, thanks for this, I have now got it working using SSH keys :) The only other part I needed to do is update the passwd file to set BASH for login. Once I did that I was fine.
    – djo
    Jul 7, 2013 at 23:03
30

A more suitable way to achieve the same thing would be to run:

# sudo -u jenkins ssh-keygen

That will generate the key for you here:
/var/lib/jenkins/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

3
  • Works like a charm! Oct 26, 2016 at 15:07
  • 2
    This is should be the accepted answer
    – Arun Killu
    Mar 27, 2017 at 14:55
  • In my specific use case (gerrit) I had to ssh into the server to get the known_hosts entry added.
    – memoselyk
    Aug 24, 2017 at 22:32

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .