Blog / 2015 / February / 10

Jenkins Null Pointer on CVS

February 10, 2015

I got this error trying to access CVS from one of my Jenkins projects:

Started by timer
Building in workspace /var/lib/jenkins/workspace/project
FATAL: null
java.lang.NullPointerException
    at hudson.scm.CVSSCM.getBranchName(CVSSCM.java:289)
    at hudson.scm.CVSSCM.buildEnvVars(CVSSCM.java:275)
    at hudson.model.AbstractBuild.getEnvironment(AbstractBuild.java:916)
    at hudson.scm.AbstractCvs.checkout(AbstractCvs.java:75)
    at hudson.scm.CVSSCM.checkout(CVSSCM.java:323)
    at hudson.model.AbstractProject.checkout(AbstractProject.java:1411)
    at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.defaultCheckout(AbstractBuild.java:657)
    at jenkins.scm.SCMCheckoutStrategy.checkout(SCMCheckoutStrategy.java:88)
    at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.run(AbstractBuild.java:562)
    at hudson.model.Run.execute(Run.java:1665)
    at hudson.model.FreeStyleBuild.run(FreeStyleBuild.java:46)
    at hudson.model.ResourceController.execute(ResourceController.java:88)
    at hudson.model.Executor.run(Executor.java:246)

Inadvertently, the CVS connection was marked as not requiring a password. Once the password was added back in, the problem went away. We also got a better error if we disallowed cvs update in the project config.

Tags: jenkins hudson cvs null pointer npe