Authenticate a Bitbucket Pipelines step to AWS using OIDC instead of stored access keys
domain: support.atlassian.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps
In repository settings under Pipelines > OpenID Connect, copy the Bitbucket OIDC identity provider URL and audience value for the repository.
In AWS IAM, add a new OpenID Connect identity provider using that provider URL and audience, verifying the thumbprint.
Create an IAM role with a web-identity trust policy scoped to that identity provider and audience (optionally further restricted by the OIDC subject claims), and attach the permission policies the pipeline needs.
Store the role's ARN as a repository or deployment variable, and set oidc: true on the specific step in bitbucket-pipelines.yml that needs it.
In the step's script, use the injected BITBUCKET_STEP_OIDC_TOKEN with the AWS CLI/SDK's web-identity assume-role flow (or an OIDC-assumption pipe) to obtain short-lived AWS credentials.
Known gotchas
oidc: true must be set on the specific step that needs the token — it's not a repository-wide setting, so steps without it never receive BITBUCKET_STEP_OIDC_TOKEN.
The identity provider URL and audience are unique per repository (and differ again for deployment-environment-scoped tokens); reusing values copied from a different repo's OIDC settings fails trust validation in AWS.
If the pipeline runs in a Deployment environment, the token's subject claim includes the environment name — a trust policy scoped only to the repository-level subject may reject environment-scoped runs.
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