In this post I’m going to cover using SSH between FishEye and your BitBucket server. When you configure BitBucket Server you have the option to enable SSH and HTTPS connections. Although you can use BitBucket without SSH there are scenarios where it is better to use SSH, one of them is connecting BitBucket and FishEye.
If you use HTTPS only connections with FishEye you will experience the following problems.
- You won’t see the repositories it discovered automatically in the BitBucket Repositories Tab. When you add an Application Link to BitBucket and enable SSH it will automatically scan the repositories and show them here. Technically you can live without this functionality and manually add the repositories using Native Repository access but that is more involved.
- If you add a repository link using HTTPS the user name and password is stored in plain text in the config.xml file of your FishEye instance. If you use SSH only the name of the key is stored.
Security
I was pleasantly surprised to find out an SSH server is already bundled with BitBucket, and if you have an existing SSH service already running, this one should not interfere with it. I was also weary to open up even more ports on our servers for security reasons but it looks like bundled SSH server is locked down pretty well, you can’t use it to execute arbitrary SSH commands and it is not open to existing users on the system. You can read more here in the official documentation.
Keys
Generating the keys are done automatically if you have the application link between FishEye and BitBucket configured. When you see the repository in the BitBucket Server repositories list, click on the Add button. The repository will now show Added next to its name and it will also appear in the Native repository access list. You can confirm this by clicking on the repository name in FishEye and in BitBucket by clicking on the cog icon in the repository.
NOTE: Make sure you choose the correct option when you install GIT on your FishEye server and confirm that you can run ssh.exe and git.exe from the command prompt. If it doesn’t work check your PATH variable and try restarting the FishEye service to pick up the changed PATH. You can specify the path to git.exe in FishEye but not ssh.exe, it must be able to get to it from the PATH.
If this isn’t configured properly you will receive errors in FishEye that it can’t find the ssh executable.
