Adding ActiveDirectory users to Jenkins

I work(ed) at a Windows-centric organization. Jenkins running on Windows can cause quite a stir. When adding AD users to Jenkins under Configure Global Security, the first problem you’ll encounter is, in Jenkins, users are case-sensitive. That means if your AD user is JOHN, you’ll need to add both JOHN and john, otherwise when the user decides to login with small case, it won’t work. A bigger problem is, once you cross about 50 users, you’ll start getting exception as documented in JENKINS-26963 - Form too large 213549>200000. The quick fix is to add a JVM parameter to jenkins.xml. If you’re running Jenkins behind jetty on Windows, you actually need to do this instead: prunmgr.exe //ES//Jenkins (You can get the edit string from Windows services) Funnily enough, if you visit https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Jetty, the lone comment on that page addresses the above. Considering Jenkins is bundled on Jetty you would think this was better documented.

Mono-repo with Lerna

Dev team wanted to use lerna - defined bootstrap and postinstall commands that called lerna. Lerna bootstrap default behaviour uses npm ci This will fail if no package-lock.json. If you set postinstall this will never exist Package-lock not sustainable in git when many developers contributing code Thus will fail with nipm package-lock doesnt exist. We had to use —no-ci and sacrifice the speed boost. Lerna bootstrap will also run forever if downstream npm install demands output. For eg in my case semantic.json had backslashes for paths, and gulp returns a prompt - semantic.json exists do you want to Skip Install. Lerna with loglevel silly will get stuck at ‘npm install’ on the leaf and not say anything. I found advise about not putting lerna bootstrap in a postinstall command, however that is no longer applicable. Lerna publish creates git tags for every subpackage but only if its changed, so you end up with a mess of tags with different versions. So to make sure we have 1 version for everything in the repository, I use sed to replace version in the root and packages package.json, but also change the versions of local dependencies. Lerna bootstrap calls node-gyp rebuild, which must connect to internet to download node. Unless you set nodeconfig to a local installation. Easiest way was to set config in .npmrc. Since lerna uses webpack, I got away with installing this globally. For gulp, even if I installed globally, it still complained the command didn’t exist. The solution was to —save-dev and make it a devDependency. Some places actually suggest to not use lerna bootstrap and switch to using file specifiers for local dependencies. This ends up a greater headache - lerna bootstrap downloads a ton of gulp dependencies (gulp-help, gulp-concat, etc.). Don’t heed that advice.