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