I run the continuous integration server Jenkins on my local development machine to work as a better cron. I actually run the Jenkins LTS (long term support) version since it is designed to be more stable than the developer release line.

From the Jenkins LTS docs:

Jenkins produces a new release weekly to deliver bug fixes and new features rapidly to users and plugin developers who need them. But for more conservative users, it’s preferable to stick to a release line which changes less often and only for important bug fixes, even if such a release line lags behind in terms of features.

I’d rather have stability than blazing edge features for something that is just supporting infrastructure. Since I am using a Mac, it would be nice to install this using Homebrew. The homebrew-versions keg has a version of this, so you can install it from there with:

$ brew tap homebrew/versions
$ brew install jenkins-lts

Then you can run it with the commands listed at brew info jenkins-lts. By default, jenkins-lts will have a plist to control startup and teardown of the Jenkins process at ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.jenkins-lts.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>homebrew.mxcl.jenkins-lts</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>/usr/bin/java</string>
      <string>-Dmail.smtp.starttls.enable=true</string>
      <string>-jar</string>
      <string>/usr/local/opt/jenkins-lts/libexec/jenkins.war</string>
      <string>--httpListenAddress=127.0.0.1</string>
      <string>--httpPort=8080</string>
    </array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
  </dict>
</plist>

I ran into issues where a newly started Jenkins server would intermittently stop responding after several requests. I traced this down with the Monitoring plugin to Jenkins running out of memory, and updated the plist file to include three lines about how to manage the memory of the Jenkins process:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>homebrew.mxcl.jenkins-lts</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>/usr/bin/java</string>

      <string>-XX:MaxPermSize=1024m</string>
      <string>-Xms1024m</string>
      <string>-Xmx1024m</string>

      <string>-Dmail.smtp.starttls.enable=true</string>
      <string>-jar</string>
      <string>/usr/local/opt/jenkins-lts/libexec/jenkins.war</string>
      <string>--httpListenAddress=127.0.0.1</string>
      <string>--httpPort=8080</string>
    </array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
  </dict>
</plist>

After doing this, I found that the server issues went away, and confirmed it with the Monitoring plugin. I may have set the memory size way too high, but Jenkins still does not take up much memory, so it is fine for now.