CODEWITHSUNDEEP
herokugithubsshcoffeescript
lukerollans
lukerollans

Reputation: 372

Heroku -> GitHub SSH key issue

I am writing an app hosted on Heroku which performs read/write operations on private GitHub hosted repositories.

I have done the following

When trying to perform any git operation on a GitHub hosted repository (that I have total access to), I get "Host key verification failed"

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.. as far as I can tell, the Heroku app should be able to read and push to the repo on GitHub just fine.

If I run the same script locally, everything works like a charm.

Hoping someone can help me out.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 728

Answers (2)

lukerollans
lukerollans

Reputation: 372

After hearing back from Heroku support, they mentioned something along the lines of what VonC said. The key wasn't available in Heroku so it was failing.

Although what VonC said would work I imagine, I resolved to using an OAuth Token for my git operations instead of sharing private and public keys away.

As per this article, you can use a GitHub OAuth token in place of a username and all works fine. Setting it as a Heroku config var also means that it never has to appear in your code. https://help.github.com/articles/git-automation-with-oauth-tokens

Upvotes: 2

VonC
VonC

Reputation: 1325137

If I run the same script locally, everything works like a charm.

That is because locally, in your $HOME/.ssh, you have both the private and public key.
You need both to access a repo hosting server (like GitHub or Heroku).

That means: if Heroku needs to access directly GitHub, it also needs the public and private ssh key.

You need (as in this article) to reference your private key as config vars

heroku config:add PRIVATE_KEY="-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
  MMMMMMMMaaaaaammmmammamamammamaasdhkghkdahgj8234joihsdfJHHKJGHGG
  ...
  -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----"

make sure you pass the config var when you load the key.

key = OpenSSL::PKey::RSA.new ENV["PRIVATE_KEY"], 'notasecret'

And your Heroku App will be able to use that private key when contacting GitHub.

Note that sharing private keys is frowned upon, so generating a new public/private key dedicated for Heroku accessing GitHub (and adding the new public key to the GitHub repo) is preferable.

You will find similar approach (for an Heroku app to access a private ssh key) in:

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions