Connecting Jenkins and Git

February 11, 2014

For your Jenkins job to connect to Git, you need two things:

1. An ssh key on your jenkins account

The Jenkins user needs to have a public private key pair. To do this you need to log into your command line as the jenkins user. Here is how. Use sudo if the system asks you for a password.

Once logged in, you can create your SSH key pair, and then add your public key to Github (or whatever you are using).

1. Establish the fingerprint

When you first start using Jenkins, you will probably get the following error:

Failed to connect to repository : Command "git ls-remote -h ssh://git@example.com/my/repo.git HEAD" returned status code 128:
stdout:
stderr: Host key verification failed.
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

In order to continue, log into jenkins once again in the command line (make sure you are the jenkins user by typing sudo su -s /bin/bash jenkins), and run the command:

git ls-remote -h ssh://git@example.com/my/repo.git HEAD

Now, you will be able to accept the fingerprint and continue.