Increase the Jenkins login timeout

Jenkins uses Jetty, and Jetty’s default timeout is 30 minutes. This is independent of authentication settings — I use Active Directory but it’s still this setting that affects timeouts.

You can override the timeout by passing an argument --sessionTimeout=<minutes> to the Jenkins init script, or -DsessionTimeout=<minutes> to the .war file. For example:

# Set the session timeout to 1 week
$ java -jar jenkins.war --sessionTimeout=10080

Alternatively, you can edit Jenkins’ <jenkinsHome>/.jenkins/war/WEB-INF/web.xml and add explicitly set it:

<session-config>
  <!-- one hour -->
  <session-timeout>60</session-timeout>
</session-config>

According to Oracle’s docs you can set this to 0 to disable timeouts altogether.

To find out the current value for timeouts, you can use the Groovy console provided in Jenkins:

import org.kohsuke.stapler.Stapler;
Stapler.getCurrentRequest().getSession().getMaxInactiveInterval() / 60

On my instance, this shows Result: 30.