If I'm reading this right, rather than the symlink you can start jenkins with -Duser.home=/home/jenkins

P4Java is doing something like this: 

java.io.File file = new File( <user.home> + File.separator + ".p4tickets");

try (BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file))) {

   String line = reader.readLine();

...

The JVM (because the OS says so) throws the java.nio.file.AccessDeniedException: /var/lib/jenkins

I can confirm joel_brown's workaround. Adding "-Duser.home=/home/jenkins" to the JENKINS_JAVA_OPTIONS in /etc/sysconfig/jenkins for linux installations works just fine. Thank you.

Based on Pauls comments about this being related to Jenkins and the fact that there is a workaround, I am closing this for now.

Please feel free to reopen this if you think it was unfairly closed.

I am seeing similar issue running p4sync inside docker

    [Pipeline] p4sync 09:56:43 ... p4 client -o xxxx-sandbox-81 +
    09:56:43 ... p4 info +
    09:56:44 ... p4 info +
    09:56:44 ... p4 client -i +
    09:56:44 ... View: +
    09:56:44 ... p4 counter change +
    09:56:44 ... p4 changes -m1 -ssubmitted //vproxy-sandbox-81/... +
    09:56:44 Building on Node: jd04 P4: Unable to login:      com.perforce.p4java.exception.ConnectionException: com.perforce.p4java.exception.ConfigException: java.nio.file.FileSystemException: /xxx/build/.p4tickets.lck: Read-only file system P4: Connection retry: 1

/xxx/build is home directly the build user, and it does have write access

The work around is not suitable for us since we have no admin access

can we do it inside pipeline groovy script before calling p4sync?

It turns out, p4sync was invoked outside of docker where home directory is marked as readonly by our system admin. Now i need to to figure out why my jenkins pipeline doing so.

let's close this again

Hi Dan, thank you for the update. 

I'm starting to do more investigation and testing around Docker usage; I presume that you are syncing files to a volume outside of docker container.  Do you know what type of mount ('bind', 'mount' or 'tmpfs')?  I was also wondering if you 'reuse' the volume with 'AutoClean' or 'SyncOnly' options to help reduce the sync time?

Hi Allen, we just started dockerizing Perforce build with docker host has /var/lib/docker mounted on different volume an a fast SAN storage

here is our p4sync

p4sync charset: 'none', credential: 'perforce-xxxxx', format: "${clientName}", populate: forceClean(have: true, modtime: false, parallel: [enable: false, minbytes: '1024', minfiles: '1', threads: '4'], pin: '', quiet: true, replace: true, tidy: false), source: depotSource(depot)

Just in case this saves some people some time.... I was using the bitinami jenkins docker image, as per comments above I added this enviroment lines to my docker-compose.yml which fixed this for me....

It should be the value thats in jenkins at Manage Jenkins -> Configure Sytem -> Home directory

environment:
  - 'JAVA_OPTS=-Duser.home=/opt/bitnami/jenkins/jenkins_home'

Thank you.  A great tip; I think we should add that into the documentation, just need to think of a good location.

We are observing similar issues on our side... but I think our scenario might be a little bit different.

We run our Jenkins process under a service account. This service account is not expected to connect to P4.

Users (job creators, owners), do maintain their own credentials in their local store, but it's not possible to successfully create a credentials like that - as it seems the p4plugin (p4java?) uses the main Jenkins account and it's ticket - even though we provide explicit, different user/pass pair.

Jun 24, 2024 6:42:32 AM FINE org.jenkinsci.plugins.p4.client.SessionHelper
P4: opened connection OK
Jun 24, 2024 6:42:32 AM SEVERE org.jenkinsci.plugins.p4.client.SessionHelper connect
P4: Unable to login: com.perforce.p4java.exception.ConnectionException: com.perforce.p4java.exception.ConfigException: java.nio.file.FileAlreadyExistsException: <REDACTED: jenkins service user account's home>
Jun 24, 2024 6:42:32 AM INFO org.jenkinsci.plugins.p4.client.ConnectionHelper 
P4: Unable to login: com.perforce.p4java.exception.ConnectionException: com.perforce.p4java.exception.ConfigException: java.nio.file.FileAlreadyExistsException: <REDACTED: jenkins service user account's home>
Jun 24, 2024 6:42:32 AM SEVERE org.jenkinsci.plugins.p4.client.SessionHelper connectionRetry
P4: Connection retry: 1
Jun 24, 2024 6:42:32 AM INFO org.jenkinsci.plugins.p4.client.ConnectionHelper 
P4: Connection retry: 1
Jun 24, 2024 6:42:35 AM SEVERE org.jenkinsci.plugins.p4.client.SessionHelper connectionRetry
P4: Invalid credentials. Giving up...

Is it expected behavior? Should we always authenticate the Jenkins process owner with P4 server, even though other jobs are not even planning to use these credentials?

Edit: huh. We also have a symlinked homes. And for some reason just pure "touch <jenkins process owner home>/.p4tickets" did the trick. Some symlink/file existence assessment issue?