Bitbucket Pipelines SSH documentation -> not working?

Jan Mueller

Hello, 

I've followed the instructions in this article: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/use-ssh-keys-in-bitbucket-pipelines-847452940.html 

It looks like the information provided is more or less useless as following step by step does not result in having success. 

Using the built-in "feature" of having bitbucket generate a SSH pair for the user results in a password protected private-key which can not be used to connect. 

Why is this information in the documentation?

--- 

What I want to achieve: 

Connect via SSH and run a simple command (write some text into a file). That's it for now. 

 

---  

Anyways .. here's what I did: 

1. go to bitbucket.org -> your repo -> settings -> pipelines -> ssh keys 

2. generate SSH key & copy public key (also fetch host fingerprint while already here) 

3. login to the target server and add the generated public key to ~./ssh/authorized_keys (and making sure the file and enclosing folder are having the right permissions 600/700) 

4. use this recipe: 

image: atlassian/default-image:2

pipelines: 
  default: 
    - step: 
        script: 
          - apt-get update -y 
          - apt-get install -y ssh 
          - ssh -t pipelines@staging.xxxxxxxx.xx "echo `foo` > httpdocs/foo" 
          - echo "Everything is awesome!"

--> the build fails with this error message:  

<span>ssh_askpass: exec(/usr/bin/ssh-askpass): No such file or directory</span><span>Permission denied, please try again.</span>

<span>ssh_askpass: exec(/usr/bin/ssh-askpass): No such file or directory</span><span>Permission denied, please try again.&nbsp;</span>

<span>ssh_askpass: exec(/usr/bin/ssh-askpass): No such file or directory</span><span>Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic,password).</span>

I have a couple of questions already which neither the documentation nor the help in the GUI answers. 

I used ssh -t pipelines@.... to connect - why? Because running without the -t flag results in another error (the interactive terminal error)

Also I added a username (pipelines) which I did not set anywhere in Bitbucket. If I omit that, I'll get an error message (need a user). 

So I wonder.. what is it that I am not getting? What is the missing piece? Does it have something to do with that I used the generate SSH key function that Bitbucket / Pipelines provides which is just not working as it maybe is intended to work? <- my guess... 

I hope that my description is not too confusing and somebody (@Philip Hodder maybe?) has a couple minutes to point me into the right direction. 

I've spent hours on reading .. there are a lot of users having the exact same or similar problems. Atlassian.. where is your infamous support and superior documentation? :-/ 

Daniil Penkin

Hi @Jan Mueller,

The error about ssh_askpass is raised because the SSH key you generated is password-protected, whereas the documentation page you linked has the following note:

Any SSH key you use in Pipelines should not have a passphrase.

So SSH tries to show password prompt, which isn't possible in Pipelines because there's no one to enter anything back.

The other error ("need a user" when you don't specify username in ssh command) is raised because when don't specify a user, SSH will try to log in to remote host (staging.xxxxxxxx.xx in your case) as the same user you run SSH command locally. I bet you got this error when you disabled the aforementioned SSH key so connection proceeded beyond the key password prompt point.

As an example, I successfully ran this command in Pipelines after adding custom SSH key:

ssh -p 10080 -l www  0.tcp.au.ngrok.io 'find . -name ".*history" -exec cat {} \;'

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers,
Daniil