Using Jenkins with a private BitBucket Git repository

Question

When setting up a project in Jenkins that's hosted on bitbucket what would I put in the URL field?

The repository is private.

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with Jenkins but Bitbucket allows you to clone git repositories over https which can accept the password as part of the url, like so:

https://<user>:<pass>@bitbucket.org/<user>/<project>.git 

Answer 2

For this purpose I switched over to using the SSH protocol to talk to BitBucket. By doing this I was able to set up a private/public key pair, with the private key on my Jenkins build machine, and the public key added to my account on BitBucket. SSH can then be set up to authenticate based on this key pair.

A word of warning, if your Jenkins machine is windows based, I'd avoid using plink/TortoisePLink as the SSH agent, and instead use OpenSSH from Cygwin as it is a lot faster when cloning/updating large repositories. It was a little tricky to set this up at first, but would probably warrant a separate Stack Overflow question if required.