Drone SSH debugging plugin

This is a plugin for Drone CI to enable remote build debugging and monitoring over SSH.

Since Drone build runners do not expose their containers' open ports to the public, Serveo is used as a jump box for forwarding SSH connections. This allows the plugin to work in any build environment with Internet access, including the hosted Drone Cloud service.

Setup

Add the following step to the beginning of your pipeline:

  - name: start-debug-server
    image: kdrag0n/drone-ssh-debug:latest
    detach: true

    settings:
      authorized_keys:
        # authorized_keys for SSH debug server in ssh_authorized_keys secret
        from_secret: ssh_authorized_keys

    when:
      event:
        exclude:
          - pull_request

You will then need to create a list of SSH keys that are authorized to log into the server and save the list as a secret named ssh_authorized_keys on Drone. The standard SSH authorized_keys format is used. Password authentication is not currently supported due to potential security concerns.

After the step has been added and the authorized_keys secret has been populated, check the output of the start-debug-server step for the command to use for connecting to the SSH server. A unique SSH hostname is generated for each build based on Drone's environment variables.

Waiting after failed builds

Optionally, if you want failed builds to pause at the end for a configurable amount of time for a quick post-mortem debugging session, you may add the following step at the end:

  - name: wait_for_debug
    image: alpine

    environment:
      # Amount of time to wait for debugging
      # This is intended to serve as a brief preliminary analysis, not a
      # full-fledged post-mortem analysis session
      DEBUG_TIME: 2m

    commands:
      - sleep $DEBUG_TIME

    when:
      status:
        - failure
      event:
        exclude:
          - pull_request

Adjust the wait time (DEBUG_TIME) as desired.