Jenkins the OS X app now works on Lion

[Sami Tikka]

I'm glad to announce my alternative OS X installer for Jenkins is now
compatible with OS X 10.8 Lion.

But why another Jenkins installer for OS X? Two reasons:

1) Jenkins.app predates the official Jenkins installer by a few
months. (First commit was on 2011-02-08 using the Fossil SCM.) I have
always used Jenkins.app myself at home. I have not made much noise
about it because I believed everyone was happy with the official
installer.

2) Lately I have become aware that some people have trouble with
Jenkins on Mac. If you use the official Jenkins Mac OS X installer
which sets up Jenkins as a background daemon, you might have problems
with automating code signing or running a Mac application that needs
access to the GUI session to display windows.

These problems are caused by Jenkins running as a dedicated user and
as a launch daemon (= a background service) with no access to another
user's keychain or GUI session. Launch daemons are designed to handle
specific system level maintenance tasks and they are cut off from
anything a user might want to do, like display a window or move the
mouse.

Jenkins.app is an alternative way to run Jenkins on the Mac.
Jenkins.app runs Jenkins as the user who launched it, right there in
the user's GUI session context.

Jenkins.app has no windows, only a Dock icon and a menu to quit
Jenkins. It is easy to to play with Jenkins, starting and stopping it
at will.

Earlier versions of Jenkins.app did not work on Lion but I only found
out after I did a clean re-install of my Mac. (Hey Apple, thanks!)

If you want to check it out,
source is at https://github.com/stisti/jenkins-app,
ready-to-run downloads are at https://github.com/stisti/jenkins-app/downloads

-- Sami

[domi]

why not add this one to the list of native installers/packages?
/Domi

[Sami Tikka]

Well, I did talk about it on the developer list in last June, but back
then the general feeling was the jenkins-as-launch-daemon was better
because it can start without requiring a user to log in.

And this is just 50 lines of applescript :) I'll try to add some more
features to it so it doesn't have to feel ashamed next to more
featureful installers for Windows and Linux :)

-- Sami

2012/3/13 domi <do...@fortysix.ch>: