Have a Jenkins instance with a specific user, say jenkins, and you decided you needed to use docker commands from within Jenkins. How does one go about doing that?

There are a couple of steps that need done. Obviously you start by installing docker.

Well it seems that installing Docker on Centos7 via yum does not create a docker group — rather, it creates a dockerroot group. So one must follow the instructions here to correctly add the jenkins user to that group.

If one were to try running docker commands within Jenkins after this is done, it will not work. One still ends up with the following error in the Jenkins console

Interestingly enough running the same on the command prompt works just fine.

Even a Jenkins safeRestart did not help either.

The issue lies in the fact that our Jenkins instance was being managed as a service. Restarting the service did it!

So there you have it — make sure you are adding the jenkins user to the right group, and systemctl restart jenkins afterwards.