What could cause a step to fail without any apparent reason?

Question

I have a PR pipeline that has a single step that runs a bunch of unit tests. This step started failing without any apparent reason i.e. no tests failed or had errors and the pipeline itself is not reporting any errors. What could cause this?

This is at the bottom of the "build teardown" log

Gunnar Þór Pálsson · Answer

As it turned out, the script that was running the tests was returning a non-zero exit code because of an error. The error just got overlooked in a sea of log output that otherwise looked completely normal.

Gunnar Þór Pálsson · Answer

Thank you for your response. I've submitted a ticket.

Theodora Boudale · Answer

Hi @Gunnar Þór Pálsson  and welcome to the community!

We'll need more info to figure out why a certain step fails, like

* the command that fails
* the output of this command
* are there any errors/messages in the column left to the Pipelines log for this build

If you want to share the Pipelines log file of such a failed build, after removing any sensitive/private info, I can take a look.

Alternatively, you can open a ticket with the support team (the support ticket will be visible only to you and Atlassian staff). With a support ticket open, the support team will be able to access the build and assist you.

You can open a ticket via https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/. In "What can we help you with?" select "Technical issues and bugs" and then Bitbucket Cloud as product. Please make sure to also give the URL of the build that fails.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions.

Kind regards,
Theodora