Maven jgitflow plugin - maven

Question

I don't know if any of you do use the maven plugin jgitflow.
when running
clean jgitflow:release-start jgitflow:release-finish
on hudson, I get the following error:
org.apache.maven.lifecycle.LifecycleExecutionException: Failed to
execute goal external.atlassian.jgitflow:jgitflow-maven-plugin:1.0-m5.1:release-start
(default-cli) on project test-git-release: Execution default-cli of goal
external.atlassian.jgitflow:jgitflow-maven-plugin:1.0-m5.1:release-start
failed: String index out of range: -6
My pom.xml looks as follows:
<plugin>
<groupid>external.atlassian.jgitflow</groupid>
<artifactid>jgitflow-maven-plugin</artifactid>
<version>1.0-m5.1</version>
<configuration>
<enablesshagent>true</enablesshagent>
<defaultoriginurl>URL</defaultoriginurl>
<autoversionsubmodules>true</autoversionsubmodules>
<nodeploy>true</nodeploy>
<pushreleases>true</pushreleases>
<flowinitcontext>
<versiontagprefix>V_</versiontagprefix>
</flowinitcontext>
</configuration>
</plugin>
On my local machine I am able to run this command successfully.

Answer 1

Apparently is a known bug: official bug report, for the same version you mentioned and same behavior (working fine locally but same exception on Jenkins/Hudson).
Note that the linked bug report above provides a workaround maybe worth to try:
The workaround is in Jenkins:
Additional Behaviours
=> checkout to specific local branch
Update
According to the comments exchanged, proposed solutions and effective resolutions, here is the historical log for future helps:
Following the suggested workaround above and setting the local branch to checkout from origin/develop, the following error was encountered:
error occurred during unpacking on the remote end: unpack-objects abnormal exit
Such an error was actually due to permissions on the concerned folder, as also suggested by other SO threads, here and here. However changing the permissions afterwards did not help.
The issue was finally solved by creating the .git repository on the server itself. Doing so gave the group of the folder the same permissions as the owner.

Answer 2

A little timesaver for all the folks working with GitLab and experiencing this problem:
GitLab's Runner works on a DETACHED HEAD, which causes JGitFlow's search for GIT refs to fail, resulting in exactly this error.
The solution is as it is for Jenkins: before performing the JGitFlow operation, make a checkout. For GitLab you can do this by adding a git checkout in the /script part of the respective pipeline your gitlab-ci.yml, for example:
sample-pipeline:
stage: release
script:
-git checkout -B master
-mvn --batch-mode jgitflow:release-start jgitflow:release-finish
Since JGitFlow automatically checks out the develop branch and does its magic from there, you can always check out the master beforehand, as it has no effect at all; its just important that its not a DETACHED HEAD when GitLab starts its search for refs.