How to become a Jenkins user?

Question

I have installed Jenkins and during installation an user named jenkins has been created. I can see from the documentation:

The 'jenkins' user is created to run this service.

Now I need to become this jenkins user. I have in the following ways:

[root@hostname ~]# sudo su - jenkins
[root@hostname ~]# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

[root@hostname tmp]# su - jenkins
[root@hostname tmp]# whoami
root

Why switch user to the jenkins user is not working?

I am on RHEL.

cat /etc/*release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.3 (Santiago)

Answer 1

Basically for this Jenkins user jenkins bash was not configured.

jenkins:x:496:492:Jenkins Continuous Build server:/var/lib/jenkins:/bin/false

So we need to set the bash for this user and that resolved the issue. I used the following command:

sudo usermod -s /bin/bash jenkins

See below:

jenkins:x:496:492:Jenkins Continuous Build server:/var/lib/jenkins:/bin/bash

And now I can perform su and can use bash.

Answer 2

It is also possible to run:

su - jenkins -s /bin/bash

Answer 3

It's more like a queastion for superuser but:

You don't need sudo when switching the user. su will ask for the users password anyway:

su - jenkins

You can also use sudo to execute a single command as another user with the -u option. If that command is a shell, you'll get a shell. E.g.:

sudo -u jenkins /bin/bash