If you are not using the Jenkins Mac installer, this message is of little interest to you. Feel free to move along.
Some background: The original Jenkins Mac installer set up Jenkins running as user "daemon". This was easy because the user "daemon" already exists on all Macs. In other ways this turned out to be a bad move because the daemon user has a home directory that it does not own, which makes it difficult to do some things like set up ssh for Jenkins. Version 1.449 of the Mac installer for Jenkins introduced a new installer customization: the possibility to choose to create a new user called "jenkins" and set up Jenkins running under that account. The home directory for that user was /Users/Shared/Jenkins, and it was writable for the user. /Users/Shared/Jenkins/Home, which is used for JENKINS_HOME, was chowned from user "daemon" to user "jenkins". This was an optional installation customization and the default installation still sets up Jenkins running as user "daemon". I did not dare change the default in case it would break something. The Question: We are now planning to make some changes to the Mac installer and while at it, I'm considering should we change the default user from daemon to jenkins. As far as I know, it is safe to create the new jenkins user and chown all files to the new user. I do not know why it should not be the default and why the choice of running Jenkins as user "daemon" could not be dropped altogether. What does the Jenkins Mac user community think? Do you have something in your Jenkins setup that depends on being run as user "daemon"? What would break if Jenkins runs as user "jenkins"? Please stop me now before it is too late :) -- Sami
