Gitlab maven:3-jdk-8 Cannot get the revision information from the scm repository, cannot run program "git" in directory error=2, No such file or directory

Introduction

In a Gitlab project setup the most recent Docker image for maven was always retrieved from the internet before each run by having specified image: maven:3-jdk-8 in the gitlab-ci.yml. The image details can be found here.

Of course this is not a best-practice; your build can suddenly start failing at a certain point because an update to the image might have something changed internally causing things to fail.

What you want is controlled updates. That way you can anticipate on builds failing and plan the upgrades in your schedule.

The issue and workarounds/solutions

And indeed suddenly on March 29 2018 our builds started failing with this error:

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.codehaus.mojo:buildnumber-maven-plugin:1.4:create (useLastCommittedRevision) on project abc: Cannot get the revision information from the scm repository :
[ERROR] Exception while executing SCM command.: Error while executing command. Error while executing process. Cannot run program "git" (in directory "/builds/xyz"): error=2, No such file or directory

That message is quite unclear: is git missing? Or is the directory wrong? Or could the maven buildnumber plugin not find the SCM repository?

After lots of investigation it turned out the maven:3-jdk-8 image indeed had changed about 18 hours before.

And after running the maven command in a local version of that Docker image indeed the same error occured!  Awesome, the error was reproducable.

And after installing git again in the image with:

- apt-get update
- apt-get install git -y

the error disappeared!  But a new one appeared:

[ERROR] The forked VM terminated without properly saying goodbye. VM crash or System.exit called?

This also hadn't happened before. After some searching it turned out it might be the surefire and failsafe plugins being outdated.

So I updated them to 2.21.0 and indeed the build succeeded.

Here's the issue reported in the Docker Maven github. UPDATE: it is caused by an openjdk issue (on which the maven:3-jdk-8 is based upon.

This issue made us realize we really need an internal Docker repository. And so we implemented that :)

One disadvantage about Docker images is that you can't specify a commit hash to use. Yes you can specify a digest instead of a tag, but that is a unique UUID hashcode only. You can't see from that hashcode anymore the (related) tagname.