Using rsync to remote SSH user with no shell access

Question

I set up Jenkins CI to deploy my PHP app to our QA Apache server and I ran into an issuse. I successfully set up the pubkey authentication from the local jenkins account to the remote apache account, but when I use rsync, I get the following error:

[jenkins@build ~]# rsync -avz -e ssh test.txt [email protected]:/path/to/site
protocol version mismatch -- is your shell clean?
(see the rsync man page for an explanation)
rsync error: protocol incompatibility (code 2) at compat.c(64) [sender=2.6.8]
[jenkins@build ~]# 

One potential problem is that the remote apache account doesn't have a valid shell account, should I create a remote account with shell access and part of the "apache" group? It is not an SSH key problem, since ssh [email protected] connects successfully, but quickly kicks me out since apache doesn't have a shell.

Answer 1

That would probably be the easiest thing to do. You will probably want to only set it up with a limited shell like rssh or scponly to only allow file transfers. You may also want to set up a chroot jail so that it can't see your whole filesystem.