sftp: unrecognized option: -

[Rob Buijs]

Hi,

With a sftp script like the following one, I get a deployment faillure/

 - pipe: atlassian/sftp-deploy:0.5.8
     variables:
        DEBUG: 'true'
        USER: 'wwwuser'
        SERVER: '<servername>'
        REMOTE_PATH: '<path>'
        LOCAL_PATH: '${BITBUCKET_CLONE_DIR}/<deploy stuff>'
        EXTRA_ARGS: "--exclude='.*'"

In the logs this is the sftp command that's generated. The empy '-' is the cause of the problem, but I can't find how to remove it.

sftp -b - -rp -v '--exclude='\''.*'\''' wwwuser@<servername>:<path>

[Oleksandr Kyrdan]

Hi @Rob Buijs

Thank you for your question!

Found this discussion and I'll try to help.

1. The empty '-' in the SFTP command is not an issue, pipe use it as part of -b option:

man sftp

-b batchfile
Batch mode reads a series of commands from an input batchfile instead of stdin. Since it lacks user interaction it should be used in conjunction
with non-interactive authentication to obviate the need to enter a password at connection time (see sshd(8) and ssh-keygen(1) for details).

A batchfile of ‘-’ may be used to indicate standard input. sftp will abort if any of the following commands fail: get, put, reget, reput, rename,
ln, rm, mkdir, chdir, ls, lchdir, chmod, chown, chgrp, lpwd, df, symlink, and lmkdir.

Termination on error can be suppressed on a command by command basis by prefixing the command with a ‘-’ character (for example, -rm /tmp/blah*).
Echo of the command may be suppressed by prefixing the command with a ‘@’ character. These two prefixes may be combined in any order, for example
-@ls /bsd.

2. The root cause for the error 

sftp: unrecognized option: -

is

EXTRA_ARGS: "--exclude='.*'"

that you try to pass into sftp, but sftp supports only:

sftp

usage: sftp [-46AaCfNpqrv] [-B buffer_size] [-b batchfile] [-c cipher]

          [-D sftp_server_path] [-F ssh_config] [-i identity_file]

          [-J destination] [-l limit] [-o ssh_option] [-P port]

          [-R num_requests] [-S program] [-s subsystem | sftp_server]

          destination

So, to have ability to exclude files you could use an alternative pipe:

atlassian/rsync-deploy

Example with an EXTRA_ARGS to exclude all files with '.txt' extension from deploy.

script:
  - pipe: atlassian/rsync-deploy:0.10.1
    variables:
      USER: 'ec2-user'
      SERVER: '127.0.0.1'
      REMOTE_PATH: '/var/www/build/'
      LOCAL_PATH: 'build'
      DEBUG: 'true'
      EXTRA_ARGS: '--exclude=*.txt'

CC: @Beau Liddell @Ankit Gupta 

Best regards,
Oleksandr Kyrdan

[Rob Buijs]

I have a ssh key for that account, not a password. I tried with a fake password, just to see what happened:

+ echo -e '\e[37mDEBUG: Executing echo "mput /opt/atlassian/pipelines/agent/build/avada-child-theme" | sshpass -p blieb sftp -o PubkeyAuthentication=no -rp -v --exclude='\''.*'\'' wwwuser@<server>:<path>\e[0m'

error remains the same:

sftp: unrecognized option: -

[Beau Liddell]

@Rob Buijswere you able to get this resolved? I'm facing the exact same issue.

[Rob Buijs]

No, we never resolved this issue. We worked around it with scp

[Ankit Gupta]

Hi Rob,

You can try setting the PASSWORD variable for the pipe.

As per the code: https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/sftp-deploy/src/5166e989d76963957c12e2eb2c861d9cf6ba434d/pipe.sh#lines-100

In case the $PASSWORD var isn't defined, the other sftp cmd is triggered (which leads to error for you). Its possible the cmd doesn't work with PASSWORD based servers