Bamboo remote build agent cannot find powershell.exe after installing nodejs

Question

I just installed nodejs on one of my build servers (Win Server 2008 R2) which hosts a Bamboo remote agent. After completing the installation and doing a reboot I got stuck in the following situation:

The remote Bamboo build agent is running as a windows service with user MyDomain\MyUser. When a build with an inline powershell task is executing it fails with the error (from the build agent log):

com.atlassian.utils.process.ProcessNotStartedException: powershell could not be started
...
java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "powershell"
...
java.io.IOException: CreateProcess error=2, The system cannot find the file specified

Loggin on to the server as MyDomain\MyUser, I have checked that powershell is in the path:

where powershell
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe

I have tried to restart the service and reboot the machine multiple times. No luck. The only thing that works is if I execute my scripts as a bat file with an absolute path to powershell - but I do not want that.

I have searched for solutions on this, but even though this one seems related: Hudson cannot find powershell after update to powershell 3 - the proposed solutions do not work.

What am I missing here?

Answer 1

If you do a default installation of nodejs you will see that it adds nodejs and npm to the path. Sometimes I have seen that the installer adds a user variable named PATH - it might be that the Bamboo agent decides to read the user path without "merging" it with the system path. I think it would be worth a try to give that a look.

Answer 2

As per Atlassian support page, this is related to a bug in Java Service Wrapper. I tried Workaround-2 since there was no user PATH variable in my system. I had to uninstall bamboo agent service and Java 64 versions from the agent machine to apply the workaround-2.