Jenkins Gerrit Trigger - "/var/lib/jenkins/.ssh/id_rsa" is not a valid key file

Question

I've installed Jenkins in an Ubuntu server by following the documentation from Jenkins Install documentation and I am trying to set up Gerrit Trigger Plugin. While setting up Administrative Settings section the SSH Keyfile section always gives the error "/var/lib/jenkins/.ssh/id_rsa" is not a valid key file.

I've generated the ssh keys as the Jenkins user in the default location "/var/lib/jenkins/"

I've tried generating the keys with ssh-keygen, ssh-keygen -t rsa, ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048 and the keys are generated with and without a passphrase also as pem file but still shows as invalid key file.

The files are present in the "/var/lib/jenkins/.ssh/" location

jenkins@jenkins:~/.ssh$ ls -la
total 16
drwx------  2 jenkins jenkins 4096 Oct  9 14:18 .
drwxr-xr-x 17 jenkins jenkins 4096 Oct  9 14:18 ..
-rw-------  1 jenkins jenkins 2602 Oct  9 14:05 id_rsa
-rw-r--r--  1 jenkins jenkins  569 Oct  9 14:05 id_rsa.pub

I didn't find any log entries regarding this in jenkins log file also not in the web portal System Log section.

Trepidation

have you looked in the file? is the format correct? have you tried using the keys to ssh into another pc with ssh-copy-id ? – Portamento

Yes, the file content seems fine and I can ssh to gerrit server by ssh -p 29418 -i /var/lib/jenkins/.ssh/id_rsa jenkins@gerrit-domain – Trepidation

Answer 1

Try to generate the key with the following command:

ssh-keygen -m PEM

Surplice

Do you have a reference for that? – Rem

Well, that actually did not work for me. – Rem

Answer 2

Following are the steps worked for me.

1. Currently my Jenkins home directory is pointing to /home/home_for_jenkins .And I need to use a different BOT user to fetch the Gerrit events.

2. In order to achieve the above requirement, I have generated ssh keys for BOT user by using ssh-keygen -m PEM command and copied the generated keys to /home/home_for_jenkins folder and changed the permissions accordingly

But