Share environment variables between steps in Bitbucket Cloud Pipelines

Summary

• The purpose of this how-to article is to explain why environment variables are not available between build steps by default and to provide a solution to share environment variables between your build steps by making use of artifacts in your YML configuration.

• An example use case for this would be that an environment variable has its value generated dynamically in StepA, then StepB performs some actions as a result of the environment variable generated in StepA.

Environment

• Bitbucket Cloud Pipelines

Solution

Each build step that is executed spins up its own individual and isolated build container, for this reason - environment variables generated within a build step are not visible to other build steps.

To share your environment variables between build steps, you can reference the worked example below:

• Create a file to store the variable (for example: a text document), then echo the value of the variable into that file and declare it as an artifact:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 pipelines: default: - step: script: - my_variable=123 - touch bitbucket_env.txt - echo $my_variable >> ./bitbucket_env.txt artifacts: - bitbucket_env.txt

• Reference the artifact file in a subsequent build step so that its value can be extracted and assigned to an environment variable for usage by that subsequent step:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 pipelines: default: // previous steps - step: script: - my_variable=$(cat ./bitbucket_env.txt) - echo $my_variable