Setting up Jenkins to work with Mercurial on Windows

After spending one day trying to get a build working on a machine other than my development laptop, I decided it was time to setup the project on a continuous integration server.

As I had some trouble getting Jenkins to work with Mercurial, I thought I'd document the steps here for reference.

Environment (pre Jenkins)

• Windows Server 2008
• Mercurial Source Control (hosted on BitBucket)

Quickstart

1. Install Jenkins (1.448)
2. Install TortoiseHg (2.2.2)

Setup Plugins in Jenkins

> Manage Jenkins > Manage Plugins > Available

Tick the boxes for these plugins:

• Mercurial Plugin
• MSBuild Plugin

> Download now and install after restart

> Restart Jenkins when installation is complete and no jobs are running

Mercurial will appear under Source Code Management when you configure a job.

MSBuild will be available under the Build header when you configure a job.

Getting Mercurial working with Jenkins
HTTP
I got this working by changing the account Jenkins runs under (> Start > Run > services.msc > Jenkins > Log On >  This account:), from the local system account, to my account (Note: my account is an admin account, so I'll have to create a Jenkins only account, with less permissions. It's not secure to have a service run under admin!).

Mercurial could then access my username and password, as setup in C:\Users\username\mercurial.ini

SSH
I could not get the Mercurial plugin to work with SSH adequately, but I tried, you can read on, but it may not prove useful nor interesting.

For the Repository URL field, I put in my BitBucket SSH url - ssh://hg@bitbucket.org/username/repository


When I tried to build the project, Jenkins would just hang indefinitely on:


hg clone --rev default --noupdate ssh://hg@bitbucket.org/username/repository "C:\Program Files\Jenkins\jobs\Test\workspace"

So I ran the command myself on the command prompt.

Up pops PuTTY Security Alert, asking if you trust the host, and want to cache the rsa key fingerprint - it appears that Jenkins cannot get past this screen.

As Jenkins is running under the local system account, I decided to see if changing it to run under my account (> Start > Run > services.msc > Jenkins > Log On >  This account:) would make a difference. It did, I assume this is because PuTTY has cached the security key under my account settings.

But I then ran into this error:

remote: No supported authentication methods left to try!

abort: no suitable response from remote hg!

So I used Pageant to add the BitBucket private (ppk) key file (created by myself).

But then I ran into this error, again:

remote: No supported authentication methods left to try!

abort: no suitable response from remote hg!

So I tried the command prompt myself, it worked. Then I tried Jenkins, and it worked. However, Jenkins' Mercurial plugin only works with SSH IF I setup Pageant and run a hg command manually first. Pretty shite IMO.