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