For ease of deployment, but without wanting to dive straight into Helm (just yet), I decided to try to stand up a very simple / crude Kubernetes deployment based on Jenkins. Needless to say, it wasn’t as simple as I’d hoped: I ran into a number of permission related problems.

On first pass, I got a log message which said that the Jenkins didn’t have permission to write to /var/jenkins_home/copy_reference_file.log. This post suggested a quick and easy fix, which was to run the container as root. This translates to a runAsUser 0 in a securityContext definition. And, per the recommendation (which includes caveats), the permission problem went away. While the pod started correctly, I then started having persistent problems with the connection refused, even when I tried on localhost from within the container. I suspected (possibly incorrectly) this was related to the root perms, so based on this issue, removed the block, deleted everything under the persistent volume that was already installed, and chown’ed to 1000 (which is the ubuntu user). This fixed the perms problem, but I was still getting a connection refused.

What I suspect was the problem was that I was trying to map a loadBalancer service definition onto port 80, which the non-privileged user 1000 didn’t have perms for. Changing this to the default of 8080 worked. This is the working spec. I’m slightly suspicious about the use of the environment variable for the volume but, as I say, it works.