Can Jenkins source .bashrc of associated user?

Question

My Jenkins runs inside Tomcat which runs under user buildman, therefore all the jobs run under that user (in CentOS). Some of my jobs depend on environment variables, which I set in .bashrc. However, the Jenkins jobs do not see any of the variables set in that file even though that script is supposed to be sourced for non-login shells, such as what I would think Jenkins should be (?).

The workaround is simple: I just copy and paste all the variables from my .bashrc into the build command script in Jenkins. But that is not very elegant. Is there any way to get Jenkins to source the .bashrc of the user it runs under so that it gets its usual configuration without having to set it separately in each job?

Answer 1

Jenkins creates a temporary sh-script for each script section (at least when using a "classical" project - for the Pipeline approach I'm not sure). This temporary script is executed with sh. On most Linux systems this is a symlink to bash, this SO-post gives some insights.
Also according to the man-pages of bash invoking bash with sh "tries to mimic the startup behavior of historical versions of sh as closely as possible, while conforming to the POSIX standard as well." This means the .bashrc is not interpreted at all. However you can try to source the bashrc for each shell-invocation...