My Jenkins installation had turned into a bit of a saga lately. I have been interested in trying out Artifactory by JFrog to store not only our produced binaries; but, additionally to proxy external dependancies and provide a host for general software used across the enterprise.

Most of the installation went pretty well, pulled a fresh JDK and JRE on the machine and ran the Installer.bat. With the service up and running, I added some detailed connection information to the Tomcat config so that the Artifactory install would not conflict with the Jenkins install; namely to have it listen on localhost and an alternate port.

As with the Jenkins installation, I created a proxy site with a URL rewrite, added NTLM Windows authentication, and updated the engineer’s GPO to include the new url ‘artifactory.host.domain.com’. A few ‘gpupdate /forces’ and the new Artifactory site was up and running with auto-login.

I created a repository for our main SaaS product and turned my focus to Jenkins.

In Jenkins, I was able to quickly add the artifactory plugin and begin the process of wiring Jenkins to Artifactory. Unfortunately, I have slammed solidly into a brick wall with an issue.

When I attempt to test the connection from Jenkins to Artifactory via the Jenkins plugin, I get an ‘unauthorized’ exception. Checking the service logs for Artifactory in IIS, I see requests arriving from Jenkins without any authentication information. I would expect that IIS would respond to the authentication challenge from the Artifactory site with the application pools identity and properly negotiate. In this case that is not happening.

Since Jenkins and Artifactory are on the same host, I could reroute Jenkins to the localhost ip and bypass the NTLM authentication; but, then all my URLs for the links in Jenkins to Artifactory would have URLs that are inaccessible to human users.

At this point I do not have a solution. So if anyone reading this wants to chime in with any ideas … feel free to tell me I am doing it all wrong in the comments.