Github Deploy Keys

· 2 min read

The easiest way to clone, pull and push code to a private repo on Github is to use a deploy key. The deploy key is a public key that you can add to your Github repository. This key will be the public SSH key of your Unix server located at ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. The private key will be located at ~/.ssh/id_rsa and should never be shared with anyone.

To add the deploy key to your Github repository, follow these steps:

  • go to your Github repository (https://github.com/silversixpence-crypto/dapol)
  • click on Settings in the top right corner
  • click on Deploy keys in the left sidebar
  • click on Add deploy key
  • give the key a title (e.g. My server)
  • paste the public key from your server into the Key field
  • check the Allow write access box if you want to be able to push to the repo from your server
  • click on Add key
  • you will see a success message and the key will be added to the list of deploy keys

github-deploy-keys

A problem arises when you want to use this method for multiple repositories on the same server. Github only allows an SSH key to be used once, so we need to use an unique SSH key per repo. We can solve this with some SSH config:

Create a directory to keep all the keys that will be used for repos:

mkdir /home/github-deploy-keys

Create a new SSH key for each repo:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "github-deploy-key" -f /home/github-deploy-keys/dapol

This will create two files: /home/github-deploy-keys/dapol and /home/github-deploy-keys/dapol.pub. The first file is the private key and the second file is the public key. The public key should be added to the Github repo as described above.

Now we need to tell SSH to use this key when connecting to Github. To do this, we need to create a new SSH config file:

nano ~/.ssh/config

Add the following lines to the file:

Host some-name-for-dapol-repo
    HostName github.com
    IdentityFile /home/github-deploy-keys/dapol

This tells SSH to use the private key located at /home/github-deploy-keys/dapol when connecting to Github. You can add as many keys as you want by creating a new Host section for each repo.

Now you can clone the repo using the following command:

git clone git@some-name-for-dapol-repo:silversixpence-crypto/dapol.git

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