setting up ssh for Jenkins to use at runtime

Question

I need some Jenkins jobs to have shell command line access to some other machines via ssh.

How can I do this?

I do not have the password of the target server[s], but I have a 'key' file, but when I run a job with the following

ssh -i /path/to/key/file name@someserver some_command

as a shell command, I get the following:

ssh_askpass: exec(/usr/bin/ssh-askpass): No such file or directory

ssh_askpass is a GUI utility which I nor the Jenkins user has access to.

I don't have the password to the Jenkins user (or whatever Jenkins runs as), so I cannot log in and create an ~/.ssh/id_dsa file.

What to do?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Ssh is asking for password either because the key is not valid or the key is protected by a passphrase.

Try the key by running the same command yourself to find out which problem you need to solve.

If the key is protected by a passphrase, you should probably remove the passphrase because there is no good way to input the passphrase in a Jenkins job. You can do it with ssh-keygen -p -f /path/to/key/file. Set an empty passphrase to remove passphrase.

When you use ssh command in a non-interactive build job, you should probably use option -o BatchMode=yes. You might also want to use -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no, unless you can do the first login interactively and accept the host key.