Performance graphs on Jenkins causing "Could not initialize class org.jfree.chart.JFreeChart" exceptions

Angels Answer is correct, you have to add -Djava.awt.headless=true.

However, in my case it wasn't enough: I was running Jenkins on openjdk-8-jre-headless (Debian), which doesn't contain some libraries that JFreeChart requires.

Solution: use openjdk-jre-8 instead of openjdk-jre-8-headless.

Just an additional note to the people arriving from search engines.

Solved! Somebody helped me to solve it here : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jenkinsci-users/o_Dr7Tn0i3U

It's not a bug in Jenkins but a miss-configuration. The solution is just adding -Djava.awt.headless=true to Jenkin's runtime.

I'm running Jenkins as a webapp on my Tomcat, then I just added this line to my /opt/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh : CATALINA_OPTS=-Djava.awt.headless=true

I wanted you to share this solution. Cheers from Barcelona.

/ Angel