Debugging "The step provided was invalid"

[Michael Ritter]

I'm trying to setup PHP unit testing for our PHP application using MariaDB as a "service".

Now, as soon as I declare that my step should use the service defined in "definitions" section the pipeline fails with the message "The step provided was invalid". Whenever I remove the service from the step it works.

According to https://bitbucket-pipelines.atlassian.io/validator my bitbucket-pipelines.yml is valid.

What am I doing wrong? What does the error mean? How can I debug that error?

I currently use the following bitbucket-pipelines.yml for testing:

clone:
  depth: 1
pipelines:
  default:
    - step:
        image: php:7.0-apache
        script:
          - ls
        services:
          - maria
definitions:
  services:
    maria:
      image: mariadb
      environment:
        MYSQL_ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD: 'yes'
        MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ''
        MYSQL_DATABASE: 'dev'  

[Philip Hodder · Accepted solution]

Hello,

The issue is that you have an empty string for the value of the MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD. Pipelines fails to parse this as it is a string with no content.

An alternate way of setting the MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD variable to an empty string is to set MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD="\0".

Thanks,

Phil

[Michael Ritter]

Hi Philip,

Thanks for your response, I'll try that ASAP!

It would be nice if such conditions could be built into the validator (or is there some other documentation I missed?). I guess this would simplify things for you as well...

Thanks,

Mike

[Michael Ritter]

Hi Philip,

Since I receive a different error message now, it seems to work ;-)

Thanks again!

Mike

[Michael Ritter]

Ok, setting the MySQL password to "\0" did not work, instead I got the following error:

container_linux.go:247: starting container process caused "process_linux.go:320: reading syncT run type caused \"write parent: broken pipe\""

When I set a password (like 123456) it works.

[Philip Hodder]

Excellent! I'll open an internal issue for adding the validation logic. And I'll bring up the empty variable use-case with our PMs.

Glad to see you got things working. :)