Jenkins does not use system's locales

Question

I got a interesting behavior in Jenkins.
Jenkins' shell does not use my systems locales.

Jenkins runs as user jenkins on my system.

Logged in as jenkins via SSH:

locale displayed:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
etc...

env shows LANG and LANGUAGE variables:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en

id shows the ID of user:

uid=1008(jenkins) gid=...

Entered above commands to a jenkins job shell:

locale displayed:

LANG=
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
etc...

env does not show LANG and LANGUAGE variables

id shows the ID of user (as expected):

uid=1008(jenkins) gid=...

the files:

/etc/profile contains:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=en_US:en

/etc/default/locale contains:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=en_US:en

startup script /etc/init.d/jenkins should export system's locales:

# load environments
if [ -r /etc/default/locale ]; then
. /etc/default/locale
export LANG LANGUAGE
elif [ -r /etc/environment ]; then
. /etc/environment
export LANG LANGUAGE
fi

Of course I rebooted after modifying the locales ;)

Apache also uses the system's locales
My system is an Ubuntu 14.04 installation.
Did I miss to check something else?

Thank you for reading!
I hope somebody can help :)

Solution:

This happens because the Jenkins master connects to the slave machine via non-interactive shell, so /etc/profile is not executed, and also /etc/default/locale does not have any effect.
non-interactive shells are usually using ~/.bashrc.

Nearly all details about this topic can be found on askubuntu:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/247738/why-is-etc-profile-not-invoked-for-non-login-shells

adding to ~/.bashrc:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=en_US:en

did it for me.

This 'slave problem' is also discussed here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jenkinsci-users/hscDs4pKIoU https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jenkinsci-users/g0fNnDltqeM Kind regards, whosit

Comments

[YoloTats.com]

Jenkins seems to reset all environment variables in build shells. Check the project settings. There is also an env-inject plugin.

[jasonwryan]

Your solution should be an answer, not an edit to your question...