Other Servlet Containers

Jenkins is typically run as a standalone application in its own process. The Jenkins WAR file bundles Winstone, a Jetty servlet container wrapper, and can be started on any operating system or platform with a version of Java supported by Jenkins. This is the preferred way to deploy Jenkins and is fully supported.

Theoretically, Jenkins can also be run as a servlet in a traditional servlet container like Apache Tomcat or WildFly, but in practice this is largely untested and there are many caveats. In particular, support for WebSocket agents is only implemented for the Jetty servlet container. See the Servlet Container Support Policy page for details.

Support for traditional servlet containers may be discontinued in the future.

Jenkins requires Servlet API 4.0 (Jakarta EE 8) with javax.servlet imports. Jenkins is incompatible with Servlet API 5.0 (Jakarta EE 9) or later with jakarta.servlet imports. Ensure that the Servlet API version of your chosen servlet container is compatible before running Jenkins.

Tomcat 9

Tomcat 9 is based on Servlet API 4.0 (Jakarta EE 8), which is the version of the servlet API required by Jenkins.

Later versions of Tomcat use newer versions of the Servlet API and are incompatible with Jenkins.

Jenkins can be deployed to Tomcat by placing the Jenkins WAR file in the ${CATALINA_HOME}/webapps/ directory.

To configure the Jenkins home directory, set the JENKINS_HOME Java system property via the CATALINA_OPTS environment variable. For example, create ${CATALINA_HOME}/bin/setenv.sh with the following contents:

export CATALINA_OPTS=-DJENKINS_HOME=/var/lib/jenkins

Running multiple Jenkins controllers within a single Java process is unsupported.

Scheme selection in redirect URLs is delegated to the servlet container, and Jetty handles the X-Forwarded-For, X-Forwarded-By, and X-Forwarded-Proto headers by default. With Tomcat, one needs to add a Remote IP Valve to expose these headers to Jenkins via the Servlet API. Add the following to ${CATALINA_HOME}/conf/server.xml within the <Host> section:

<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteIpValve"
       remoteIpHeader="X-Forwarded-For"
       proxiesHeader="X-Forwarded-By"
       protocolHeader="X-Forwarded-Proto" />

WildFly 26

WildFly 26 is based on Servlet API 4.0 (Jakarta EE 8), which is the version of the servlet API required by Jenkins.

Later versions of WildFly use newer versions of the Servlet API and are incompatible with Jenkins.

Jenkins can be deployed to WildFly by placing the Jenkins WAR file in the ${JBOSS_HOME}/standalone/deployments/ directory.

To configure the Jenkins home directory, set the JENKINS_HOME Java system property via the JAVA_OPTS environment variable. For example, update ${JBOSS_HOME}/bin/standalone.conf with the following contents:

JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -DJENKINS_HOME=/var/lib/jenkins"

Running multiple Jenkins controllers within a single Java process is unsupported.