Codeship SSH Debug Access

Written by: Benjamin Fritsch

At Codeship we care deeply about your productivity.

Your Continuous Integration (CI), local and production environment are not the same. They have different locale settings and sometimes even run another operating system.

With various environments, it happens that your code behaves differently on each platform. Some of your builds might fail on the Codeship but pass on your local environment as they depend on another timezone or have other environment specific dependencies.

In the past you had to write a support ticket and together we figured out what's going on with that failing test. Even though we put a lot of effort and time into customer support it still wasn't as responsive as we want it to be. It doesn't matter how hard we try to answer your questions as fast as possible, it broke your workflow. In this article I will write about our new SSH Debug Access.

Introducing the Codeship SSH Debug Build

To fix all those issues we are happy to announce SSH Debug Access.

This means that you can SSH into a build and start debugging in seconds. We checkout your code. You start with a clean environment and can debug right away.

How it works

To be able to use the Codeship SSH Debug Access you need to provide your public SSH key. Just go to your account settings.

There you'll find a "SSH Public Key" text field where you need to enter your public key.

Below each build you can find the "Debug this Build" button which fires up a debug machine for you.

You get the SSH command a few seconds after you requested the debug build. Just copy and paste it into your terminal and you are good to go.

After the login you'll see a little guide.

Making you more productive

Additionally to the SSH Debug Access we wrote a little shell script which helps you navigate around. It includes some helpful shortcuts like listing your setup and test commands so you don't need to switch to the build view back and forth. It also gives an easy command to reset the dependency cache in case you really want to start fresh.

You can find a detailed explanation of the SSH Debug Access, where to find your SSH public key and our Codeship helper script in our Documentation.

Conclusion

It is really important for us to keep you focused on your actual work. With our super fast support, SSH Debug Access and our intelligent build help (which I will write about in a different blog post) we provide you with tools that help you accomplish your tasks as fast as possible and keep you productive.

You can learn more about our SSH Debug Access in our Codeship SSH Access documentation article.

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