Can't get Jenkins to start using Tomcat
Jenkins tries to create /usr/share/tomcat7/.jenkins to store its data, but the directory isnt created, so it throws NoHome Exception.
To fix this, create the .jenkins manually (with correct own/grp permissions to tomcat) and restart tomcat.
I was facing exactly the same problem. In my case it all started with a Jenkins/Git error:
"error: could not lock config file /usr/share/tomcat6/.gitconfig: Permission denied".
Apparently all permissions were OK and .gitconfig was not locked. I've executed a chown for tomcat user and everything was just fine again after a service restart:
sudo chown -R tomcat6:tomcat6 /var/lib/tomcat6/sudo chown -R tomcat6:tomcat6 /etc/tomcat6/sudo chown -R tomcat6:tomcat6 /usr/share/tomcat6/(My Linux is Debian based)
I am not sure what user you are running tomcat as, but it looks like jenkins can't create it's home directory. Look into the JENKINS_HOME parameter.