Copy file from a Network Drive to a local Drive with a Jenkins Agent - powershell

Question

So here is the situation, I am trying to automate the copy of some files that are in a network drive into a local folder on one of my servers. The task seems to be simple and when I try the code with PowerShell or with x copy in the command line both are working pretty great.
I've installed a Jenkins agent on this Windows server 2016 server and run the agent as a service. When I try to run the same code from the Jenkins agent, it is never working.
I tried starting the agent service as local system and as the windows network administrator who has all the right
I tried with PowerShell those lines :
Copy-Item -Path "\\server IP\directory\*" -Destination "D:\Directory\" -Verbose
and
Copy-Item -Path "z:\*" -Destination "D:\Directory\" -Verbose
Both return no error but did not copy the files, and when I tried the same code with x copy I just receive no file found and the file was not copied
xcopy "\\server IP\directory\*" "D:\Directory\" /f /s /h /y
xcopy "z:\*" "D:\Directory\" /f /s /h /y
With PowerShell, I also tried inserting the copy-file command into a script and only calling the script with the Jenkins agent, and it also didn't work
I am now running in a circle and wonder how are we supposed to work with the network drive with the Jenkins agent? Or what I am doing wrong ?
Note that other PowerShell code are working great locally.

Answer 1

I tried starting the agent service as local system and as the windows network administrator who has all the right
Local system doesn't have any network permissions by default. This is the machine account, so you would have to give the machine access to "\\server\share". It is not advisable though, because permissions should be granted on finer granularity. Also, local system has too many local rights, which Jenkins doesn't need.
I don't know what you mean by "Windows Network Administrator". It sounds like this one would also have too many rights.
Usually, one creates a dedicated Jenkins (domain) user. This user will be granted access to any network paths it needs. Then you have two options:
Always run Jenkins service as this user (easiest way).
Run Jenkins under another local user and connect to network drives as the domain user only on demand: net use \\server\share /user:YourDomain\Jenkins <Password>. This adds some security as you don't need to give any local permissions to the domain user.
Both return no error but did not copy the files
To improve error reporting, I suggest you set $ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop' at the beginning of your PowerShell scripts. This way the script will stop execution and show an error as soon as the first error happens. I usually wrap my PS scripts in a try/catch block to also show a script stack trace, which makes it much easier to pinpoint error locations:
$ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop' # Make the script stop at the 1st error
try {
Copy-Item -Path "\\server IP\directory\*" -Destination "D:\Directory\" -Verbose
# Possibly more commands...
# Indicate success to Jenkins
exit 0
}
catch {
Write-Host "SCRIPT ERROR: $($_.Exception)"
if( $_.ScriptStackTrace ) {
Write-Host ( "`t$($_.ScriptStackTrace)" -replace '\r?\n', "`n`t" )
}
# Indicate failure to Jenkins
exit 1
}
In this case the stack trace is not much helpful, but it will come in handy, when you call functions of other scripts, which in turn may call other scripts too.