Use SSH KEY from ENV Var

Question

I need to run some git commands from a ruby on rails application. I have the ssh private key (password protected) stored in an env var. How can I run git commands using the ssh keys from the env var without dumping it on the filesystem?

Git literally just runs ssh. (This isn't true of jgit or Go-git so be sure you're using the C version here before you use the rest of this comment.) The ssh command literally *only* reads the keys from either an agent or from the file system, so you will *have to* load the keys into one of these two. — torek, Jun 15 '22 at 08:07

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 22 '22 at 18:59

1

After some digging I found a solution using openssl:

echo "#{private_key}" | openssl rsa -passin pass:$PRIVATE_KEY_PASSPHRASE | ssh-add -

answered Jun 22 '22 at 18:59

Kerby82

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Well done. That should work indeed. – VonC Jun 22 '22 at 20:27

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 17 '22 at 05:39

Assuming your key does not have passphrase, you can try adding it to an ssh-agent (that you can start automatically):

ssh-add - <<< "${SSH_PRIVATE_KEY}"

With passphrase, you would need to enter it somehow, which is not practical in your case.

The alternative is indeed to dump it to a file, but it can be a temp file which will be cleaned up.

In that case, set GIT_SSH_COMMAND to 'ssh -i /tmp/TempFileGenerated', and you git commands (clone/push/pull/...) will use that for any SSH URL.

Use SSH KEY from ENV Var

2 Answers2