How to securely link Bitbucket with shared hosting

To keep things simple and secure, the goal is to connect your shared hosting to a single Bitbucket repository using SSH. This setup ensures that the shared hosting server can only read from that specific repository, keeping access limited and manageable.

Stage 1: Accessing the shared hosting terminal

In your cPanel, go to the Terminal page by following the steps shown in the screenshots below. Once you’re there, ensure you’re in your main directory to get started.

cd ~ && pwd

Stage 2: Generating the SSH Keys

At this stage, we’ll create our SSH keys without a passphrase to keep things simple.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "bitbucket_key" -f ~/.ssh/bitbucket_key -N ""

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/bitbucket_key

Stage 3: Configuring SSH for Bitbucket

Now, let’s configure the SSH for our shared hosting to connect with Bitbucket and then obtain the access key.

nano ~/.ssh/config

# Configuration for Bitbucket
Host bitbucket.org
     User git
     IdentityFile ~/.ssh/bitbucket_key
     IdentitiesOnly yes

Stage 4: Adding the key to Bitbucket

The goal at this stage is to add the access key we copied in Stage 4 to the repository’s access keys.

Stage 5: Checking the connectivity

ssh -T git@bitbucket.org

Stage 6: Cloning & updating the repository on the shared hosting

After copying the SSH command to clone the repository from Bitbucket, on the terminal, we’ll change the directory to ‘directory-name’ (in my case, it’s demorepo.com). Finally, whenever there are new updates in the Bitbucket repository, we’ll pull the latest changes into our shared hosting.

git clone git@bitbucket.org:<username>/<repository-name>.git "directory-name"

cd directory-name

git pull

Stage 7: Automatically Deploying changes to the shared hosting

See the tutorial: How to securely deploy from Bitbucket to shared hosting