PermGen errors and java.lang.ClassCastException: com.sun.crypto.provider.AESCipher cannot be cast to javax.crypto.CipherSpi running Jenkins plug-in tests with PowerMock

Recently while working on a Jenkins plugin some tests were failing with PermGen errors. Even though it worked in my notebook at home (with Java 8, thus no Permgen), it failed in a CloudBees hosted Jenkins job, and also on my Mac (with Java 7) at work.

As I could not change the settings in the CloudBees hosted Jenkins, I decided to spent some time investigating why these tests would require so much memory. Then I found this blog post about PowerMock.

I was not using the @PrepareForTest annotation, but after adding it the issue was gone. So I assume it either prevents PowerMock from trying to dynamically load several classes, or instructs it to unload classes after the tests. But in anyway after adding it the issue was gone.

Then I got the following exception.

WARNING: Failed to instantiate Key[type=hudson.security.csrf.DefaultCrumbIssuer$DescriptorImpl, annotation=[none]]; skipping this component
com.google.inject.ProvisionException: Guice provision errors:

1) Error injecting constructor, java.lang.ClassCastException: com.sun.crypto.provider.AESCipher cannot be cast to javax.crypto.CipherSpi
  at hudson.security.csrf.DefaultCrumbIssuer$DescriptorImpl.<init>(DefaultCrumbIssuer.java:127)

1 error
    at com.google.inject.internal.ProviderToInternalFactoryAdapter.get(ProviderToInternalFactoryAdapter.java:52)

And then thanks to this issue I understood that PowerMock was mocking javax.crypto classes. Turns out it is quite easy to tell PowerMock to ignore certain classes from being mocked, with the @PowerMockIgnore annotation.

// snip
@RunWith(PowerMockRunner.class)
@PowerMockIgnore({"javax.crypto.*" })
public class TestAbstractUnoChoiceParameter {
//
}
// snip

Added a couple of notes to this Jenkins Wiki page so that users facing similar issues can try these possible workarounds.

Hope that helps someone!

Categories: Blog

Tags: Jenkins, Software Quality