Best practice for secret files

[Steven Gillies]

Is there really no straight-forward way to inject secret files into a build with Bitbucket pipelines? Coming from Jenkins, this feels like a massive oversight.

I have seen people say "save it as an env variable", however I tried this with some TLS certificates and the indentation got messed up and the certificate became invalid.

I thought this was such an obvious use case that it would have direct support. I don't really want to have to go around creating sFTP servers to go with each repo just to copy in some secret certificates here and there.

Was this discussed at some point and the community decided on "will not fix"? If Jenkins can manage it easily enough then why can't Bitbucket?

[Patrik S]

Hello @Steven Gillies ,

Thank you for reaching out to Atlassian Support.

Secret environment variables are indeed the way to go if you want to inject secret contents into your build. The reason why the indentation got messed up in your attempt is because pipelines do not currently support line breaks in environment variables, so you will need to base-64 encode the content of the file before saving it to the environment variable:

• Linux :

$ base64 -w 0 < my_file.txt

• MacOS :

$ base64 < my_file.txt

Save the base64 encoded value (which will be just plain text) returned by the command above as the value of the environment variable (it can be a workspace,repository or deployment variable).

Then, within your pipeline script, you can decode the variable value and save it to a file :

pipelines:  

  default:

    - step:

        script:

           - (umask  077 ; echo $MY_SECRET_VAR | base64 --decode > ~/my_file.txt)

 Would you please try the suggestion above and let us know how it goes ? 

Thank you, @Steven Gillies .

Kind regards,

Patrik S

[Amit Sharma]

Hey @Patrik S 

Thanks for the suggestion.

I tried using the same way in the pipeline but I got the error "Command not found"

After that, I tried using variables directly 

(umask  077 ; $MY_SECRET_VAR | base64 --decode > ~/my_file.txt)

But no luck. Would you please suggest some other way. 

[Patrik S]

Hey @Amit Sharma and welcome to the Community!

There are multiple causes that can lead pipelines to return a Command not found error, and they are described in detail in the article Bitbucket Pipelines - Command not found error.

I suspect the issue is that the image you are using in the build might not have the base64 command. In order to confirm if that is the case, could you share with us the full log output when you execute the below command in your pipeline? 

(umask  077 ; echo $MY_SECRET_VAR | base64 --decode > ~/my_file.txt)

We would expect the "command not found error" to specify which command is missing.

Thank you, @Amit Sharma !

Patrik S

[Amit Sharma]

Hey @Patrik S  

Thanks for the quick update.

I verified that base64 is available.

Actually, I am saving encoded keys in the variable and trying to access the variable in my script.

(umask 077 ; echo $MY_KEYS | base64 --decode > ~/my_keys)

I am getting the below error on this

base64: Invalid Input.

I tried to print the value of the variable using echo and expr but no luck.

Thanks for all the support.

[Amit Sharma]

Hey @Patrik S I am able to solve this by creating a Plain repository variable for the key where I need to echo the value.

While other secure variables are working fine If we use the command. For ex.

ssh $USER@$HOST

@Patrik S thanks again for helping me out here.