There are countless posts with instructions on how to do this, I won’t create another.

This is the best and succinct I could find, kudos to the author

I’d just like to add a couple things I had to do in order to make it work:

  • Go with the LaunchAgent, easy and good control on start/stop
  • Add the log file configuration to the plist file
  • Fix the .jenkins/log directory permissions, mine was failing and I could not figure out why, if it failed to launch, it’s most likely due to a log file not being owned by the Jenkins user. You can verify this by doing the following:
    • $ ls -l ~/.jenkins to see who owns the log directory. If it says root, you need to change it to the Jenkins user.
    • Enter the following to change ownership: $ sudo chown -R <the user name> ~/.jenkins/log