Interactive shell not fully initialised when debugging iOS Fastlane builds on Mac build agent via SSH

[chrisbrook83]

If you are looking for help, please confirm the following...

• I confirm I have searched the Docs, Codemagic Sample Projects, and GitHub Discussions.
• I confirm the software versions on my local computer match the ones in CI environment (e.g. Xcode version, Gradle version). See here
• I confirm I am able to do a fresh clone of the repository and build the project on my local computer.

Which mobile framework are you using?

React Native

Steps to reproduce

1. Run a valid iOS Fastlane build manually, with SSH/VNC access enabled
2. SSH into the Mac build agent
3. Try and run the same Fastlane commands as defined in the codemagic.yaml

Expected results

Fastlane commands should behave the same as they do when running within the CodeMagic build session.

Actual results

The fastlane commands fail, as the requisite environment variables (i.e. MATCH_SSH_KEY) have not been processed correctly in the interactive bash shell session. This results in failures, such as the Match Git repo not being able to be downloaded, due to missing credentials:

Cloning into '/var/folders/w2/rrf5p87d1bbfyphxc7jdnyvh0000gn/T/d20250113-5118-snerib'...
[email protected]: Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

---

I see in the "Fetching app sources" step in the build, is where the ***_SSH_KEY environment are processed by CodeMagic:

== Add SSH key from environment variable MATCH_SSH_KEY to SSH agent ==
> ssh-add /var/folders/w2/rrf5p87d1bbfyphxc7jdnyvh0000gn/T/tmpfeiun6qq

However, if I try and run this same command in my SSH terminal on the same build agent, the folder quoted in the original command does not exist.

PS: I also had to manually start the ssh-agent in my session first:

eval `ssh-agent -s`

What manual setup steps do I need to run within the SSH terminal to get the session in the same state as when the build is running? For example:

• Start ssh-agent
• Presumably write the MATCH_SSH_KEY env variable contents to a temporary file, which is then being read by ssh-add, as per above?
• What else happens behind the scenes (i.e. in the "Preparing Build Machine" step") during the non-interactive build , that I might need to re-initialise in the interactive shell session?

Would it be possible to expose the same initialisation scripts, so they can be run in the interactive session too?

Build id (optional)

67854c5e6df962e320743542

[dam-ease]

Firstly, The reason for the error message when you SSH might be same as that in your build, I can see the error message below:

[!] No code signing identity found and cannot create a new one because you enabled `readonly`

I did a google search of the message and found similar issues to this reported in below threads with possible workarounds:
fastlane/fastlane#8810
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68820080/no-code-signing-identity-found-and-can-not-create-a-new-one-because-you-enabled
fastlane/fastlane#21679
Can you please try the suggested solutions out?

[chrisbrook83]

Hi - thanks very much for your help.

You are correct: the "No code signing identity found" is the actual issue I'm trying to debug.

However, I wasn't able to recreate the issue whilst SSH'd onto the build agent, because fastlane fails to run due to the issues described in my original post (i.e. rather than getting the "No code signing identity found" I get a "[email protected]: Permission denied (publickey)." error, presumably because the ssh-agent has not been initialised properly in the SSH session).

Are the operations run during "Preparing build machine" and "Fetching app sources" persisted in scripts on the build-agent somewhere? If so, I could just run those within my SSH session to get it into the correct state to run fastlane.

PS: I'm sure I could debug the issue locally, but I don't currently have access to a Mac. That's why I'm trying to debug it on the build agent.

[dam-ease]

Hello @chrisbrook83,

Are the operations run during "Preparing build machine" and "Fetching app sources" persisted in scripts on the build-agent somewhere? If so, I could just run those within my SSH session to get it into the correct state to run fastlane.

You aren't to run the commands in these steps during your SSH session. They are handled in Codemagic such that the clone is available during your SSH session. Once you start the SSH session, you can instead run the scripts from your yaml file.

The repository is cloned to /Users/builder/clone

The session will be automatically closed 20 minutes after the build
is completed.

You will get this message when the session is ready. So you can change directory to /Users/builder/clone and E.g for your case, the first script will be npm install
I hope this helps?

[chrisbrook83]

Thanks - I understand the source code for the build is cloned to /Users/builder/clone. That is not my problem.

In my example, my Fastlane Match commands fail unexpectedly within the SSH session.

Match uses a separate git repo (as described here). Those commands do not work in SSH because the SSH session is missing some initialisation that usually performed by CodeMagic before the build starts.

For example, the SSH session has not undergone this step (which can be seen in the usual build logs):

== Add SSH key from environment variable MATCH_SSH_KEY to SSH agent ==
> ssh-add /var/folders/w2/rrf5p87d1bbfyphxc7jdnyvh0000gn/T/tmpfeiun6qq

How can I replicate running the command above, within my SSH session (noting that the file referenced in the command does not exist) - ?