I've been setting up Jenkins to run Rails project unit and functional tests as builds.  This has been difficult, and 90% of the problems have been in getting different versions of various gems available.  RVM is supposed to help, as is Bundler.   I should have started out with a very methodical plan for giving access to the jenkins user, then having the jenkins user install rvm and create gemsets, then have the jenkins user install gems and run bundle install. Instead I got things working quickly with super-user permissions and then builds fail because it's hard to 'sudo' commands during an automated build.

Here's one problem running "bundle install" as the jenkins user:

Using rails (3.0.4)
Using right_http_connection (1.3.0) from git://github.com/rightscale/right_http_connection.git (at master) /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/open-uri.rb:32:in `initialize': Permission denied - right_http_connection-1.3.0.gem (Errno::EACCES)
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/open-uri.rb:32:in `open_uri_original_open'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/open-uri.rb:32:in `open'
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/builder.rb:73:in `write_package'
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/builder.rb:38:in `build'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/source.rb:450:in `generate_bin'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/source.rb:450:in `chdir'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/source.rb:450:in `generate_bin'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/source.rb:559:in `install'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/installer.rb:58:in `run'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/rubygems_integration.rb:93:in `with_build_args'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/installer.rb:57:in `run'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/installer.rb:49:in `run'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/installer.rb:8:in `install'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/cli.rb:220:in `install'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/vendor/thor/task.rb:22:in `send'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/vendor/thor/task.rb:22:in `run'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/vendor/thor/invocation.rb:118:in `invoke_task'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/vendor/thor.rb:263:in `dispatch'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/lib/bundler/vendor/thor/base.rb:386:in `start'
from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p352@sonicnet/gems/bundler-1.0.17/bin/bundle:13
from /usr/bin/bundle:19:in `load'
from /usr/bin/bundle:19



After reading up on similar but different errors via Google, I concluded this was probably a local filesystem permission error.  I tried granting the jenkins user various permissions in /usr/lib/ruby and /usr/local/rvm/gems -- one misleading clue was that the "right_http_connection-1.3.0.gem" file in /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/gems/cache was the only gem in that directory with a different user/group than the other gems.  Fixing that didn't fix the problem, nor did deleting that gem file.  I then realized that bundler puts gems in a different place: .bundle in the project directory.  Oh, that's owned by root -- great, fix that.  Oops, didn't work.  Finally I deleted .bundle and ran bundle install again -- as the jenkins user -- and it worked.  

(This is probably boring to most readers but it's a small payment for all the other bloggers' posts I've read that gave me clues in various debugging dead-ends. )