Setup ssh private keys for git from environment variables

git-ssh-key makes it easy to setup ssh keys for git hosting services. It is ideally meant to be used on CI to setup ssh key to access private repos. One of the use case is to install npm packages from private git repos.

It has two prerequisites:-

• You have a ssh key-pair and have added the public key to your git service.
• you have your private key encoded in base64 format and set in appropriate environment variable.

git-ssh-key needs two things to function properly. The private key and the url of the git host. You can provide any number of private key and host url pairs by setting the proper environment variables. git-ssh-key looks for a pattern in env variables to get pairs of private keys and hosts.

The pattern for private keys is: GIT_SSH_KEY_XXXXX

Example:- GIT_SSH_KEY_GITHUB GIT_SSH_KEY_GITLAB GIT_SSH_KEY_BUTBUCKET GIT_SSH_KEY_COMPANY_GITLAB

This variables need to be set with appropriate private keys encoded in base64.

The pattern for host urls is:- GIT_SSH_HOST_XXX

Example:- GIT_SSH_HOST_GITHUB='github.com' GIT_SSH_HOST_GITLAB='gitlab.com' GIT_SSH_HOST_BUTBUCKET='bitbucket.org' GIT_SSH_HOST_SELF_GITLAB=gitlab.self.com

For every host, there must be a corresponding private key and vice versa with an exception to few popular hosts.

You don't need to provide host urls for Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket. They are set by default to github.com, 'gitlab.com' and 'bitbucket.org' respectively. Though if you do provide host urls for these services, provided urls will override the default urls.

git-ssh-env setup

And it will setup ssh keys for all the services for which environment variables are set.

To cleanup when you no longer need the access, run

git-ssh-env teardown

It will remove all the added keys and config.

See the example folder to get an idea about how git-ssh-env should be used.

In that folder if you open the package.json file, you can see that it is dependent on a private package hosted on gitlab. That package is also dependent on a private package hosted on bitbucket. Both those platforms have diffrent keys. I have added GIT_SSH_KEY_GITLAB and GIT_SSH_KEY_BUTBUCKET environement variables to Travis CI with respective private keys in base64 encoded format.

index.js file checks that both the packages were added properly by checking the output.

This test is run on every CI build. You can see the log of the last build here.

npm install -g git-ssh-key

git-ssh-key [setup|teardown]

I got a lot of help from this gist.

MIT © Siddharth Doshi