Hudson - Maven is failing (cannot create /dev/null/.m2) on Tomcat-6 - Gentoo

Question

I'm having major issues with getting Hudson up and running on a gentoo server with Tomcat 6. I'm able to deploy Hudson just fine, and I can browse the web-application, configure it and set up builds etc.

However, when I try to run a build (in example "clean test" on a Maven2 project) I get this error

ERROR: Failed to create /dev/null/.m2

I've google'd and for some it seems to be helping to put -DHUDSON_HOME=/home/hudson and -DMAVEN_HOME=/home/hudson in /etc/init.d/tomcat-6's JAVA_OPTS. However, I've tried that and by doing the same in /etc/conf.d/tomcat-6 , but I'm still getting this error.

Has any of you had to deal with this before?

Answer 1

You are likely running Hudson under a special user. Try setting the home directory of that user to /home/hudson in /etc/passwd using the vipw command.

Answer 2

Another way would be to disable user level config with your $M2_HOME/conf/settings.xml but Jouni's solution is the better choice.

Answer 3

If you cannot change the user's home directory, you can trick Hudson/Jenkins into thinking the user's home is another directory (previously created and which the user has read and write access). Then pass it as an argument in Hudson/Jenkins startup script, e.g.:

export JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Duser.home=<path to the directory>"