Jenkins: what is the correct format for private key in Credentials

Question

I\'m creating a job in Jenkins 2.152 running on Windows Server 2016 which needs to pull from a git repo hosted on bitbucket.org. I tested the ssh key through git-bash so I k

Answer 1

In the end, I couldn't find a way to make pasting private keys to Jenkins credentials work.

While it might common knowledge for many, I decided to put the workaround below anyway.

Here is what I did as a workaround to pull my private repositories from Bitbucket.org:

1. Log in to your Windows host as the user which runs Jenkins Service. In my case, Jenkins Service runs as a dedicated user because I needed to access network shares with write privileges restricted to this user only.
2. Open Git-bash and generate SSH keys with ssh-keygen command accepting all defaults
3. In Jenkins, enter the git repo URL as git@bitbucket.org:team_name/repo_name and leave the credentials as None

This way Git and SSH will be able to find SSH keys in the default location, which usually is c:\Users\username.ssh\

Hope this helps somebody.