New installation of Jenkins Enterprise reports jenkins dead but pid file exists

Issue

When you try to check the status by doing sudo service jenkins status, you get the message jenkins dead but pid file exists.
Jenkins does not start and the directory /var/logs/jenkins is empty

Environment

CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise
Red Hat distribution

Resolution

This might be due to a permission issue.

You need to ensure that the owner of the following paths and everything inside is jenkins:jenkins -> /var/log/jenkins, /var/lib/jenkins, /var/run/jenkins, /var/cache/jenkins

You can check that the jenkins user has the right permission to work under those paths. As an example, for /var/log/jenkins:

$ ls -la /var/log

drwxr-xr-x. 12 root root 4096 Feb 19 15:17 log

$ ls -la /var/log/jenkins

drwxr-x---. 2 jenkins jenkins 4096 Feb 19 15:18 jenkins▼

This article is part of our Knowledge Base and is provided for guidance-based purposes only. The solutions or workarounds described here are not officially supported by CloudBees and may not be applicable in all environments. Use at your own discretion, and test changes in a safe environment before applying them to production systems.