Exporting MAVEN_OPTS not working for Freestyle Jenkins Projects

I’m running Jenkins version 1.428 and I have a “Freestyle” project. The aim of this project is to upload a large tar.gz file to an artifactory repository. The team are using Maven so we started out by looking at using Maven to do the deployment. It seems simple enough – you just choose “Invoke top-level maven targets” and add the usual maven deploy details here, like so:

The trouble is, because the tar is so large (126Mb in this instance), it fails with a Java heap space issues (out of memory exception). So, it would be very tempting to try to increase the MAVEN_OPTS by passing it via the JVM Options, as shown below:

Sadly, this doesn’t work. It fails with an ugly error saying MAVEN_OPTS isn’t recognised, or some such thing.

Now, in an attempt to be clever, we thought we could simply execute a shell command first, and get that to set the MAVEN_OPTS, like so:

Good ideah huh? Yeah, well it didn’t work

It looks like there’s a general issue with setting MAVEN_OPTS for freestyle projects in Jenkins version 1.428 – see here for details.

Workarounds:

There’s actually a couple of workarounds. Firstly, you can run maven via the shell execution command, and explicitly pass the MAVEN_OPTS value:

This actually works fine, and is the preferred way of doing it in our case.

The other option is to use Ant to do the deployment – this somehow seems to use a lot less memory and doesn’t fail quite so easily. Also, you don’t have this issue with the MAVEN_OPTS being passed as you can set it directly in the ant file. Here’s the ant file I created (I also created a very basic pom.xml):

<project name=”artifactory_deploy” basedir=”.” default=”deploy_to_repo” xmlns:artifact=”antlib:org.apache.maven.artifact.ant”>
<description>Sample deploy script</description>
<taskdef resource=”net/sf/antcontrib/antcontrib.properties”/>

<property name=”to.name” value=”myrepo” />
<property name=”artifactory.url” value=”http://artifactory.mycompany.com”/&gt;
<property name=”jar.name” value=”massive.tar.gz”/>

<target name=”deploy_to_repo” description=”Deploy build to repo in Artifactory” >
<artifact:pom id=”mypom” file=”pom.xml” />
<artifact:deploy file=”${jar.name}”>
<remoteRepository url=”${artifactory.url}/${to.name}” />
<pom refid=”mypom” />
</artifact:deploy>
</target>

</project>