Is it dangerous to change the user account that the Bamboo Server service runs as?

[Joshua]

We have a Bamboo installation that has been running under the windows Local System account for years, currently building 22 plans.

While defining a new plan for a new product we're building I realized that one of the build steps must be run in the context of a real local user account, not the Local System account. The Bamboo docs state that this is supported, but the workflow they describe is more of a first-time setup workflow.

My question is, if I switch the Bamboo Server Service from running under the Local System account to running under a local (administrator) account, in a system that has years of history in it, should I expect to run into problems?

None of our build tasks do anything special like writing to the registry, etc. I'm more concerned about the stability of the build system itself.

[rsperafico · Accepted solution]

Hi @Joshua,

Along with the information provided by @Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting] on permissions, please notice:

• environment and system variables may differ between accounts (SYSTEM vs Local User) and this could be an issue when starting up Bamboo and/or running builds;
• in case you build on Local Bamboo Agents, you could also hit max open files limit when changing users accounts

Kind regards,

Rafael

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting] · Accepted solution]

The user is just a permission thing.  If you change the user that the service runs as, you need to adjust the permissions on all files and folders that Bamboo will access to be owned and have read/write access to by that user.