tmate-enabled Drone runners

tl;dr #

The gist is that a pipeline can be (re)started (usually, only failed pipelines are manually restarted, hoping for a better result as if the error was floating somewhere around the Ether and not our code most of the times) in debug mode.

After a pipeline fails in said debug mode, a tmate client connection to a tmate server (as configured in the drone server configuration files - ref) is open from withing the container that the failing step was running in and connection instructions for ssh-ing are displayed.

The error can then be debugged more intimately in the precise environment that made the bug appear.

conclusion #

Instead of repeating any more of what’s already been said, I suggest anybody interested reads the original kind-of-reference post by Brad.