Setting up private Github access with AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Ruby container

Question

Going by a recent tutorial on setting up AWS Elastic Beanstalk for Ruby deployment using Git, I just set up a Elastic Beanstalk environment from my CI server. However, the a

Answer 1

There are two approaches to authenticating with GitHub. I recommend associating your personal GitHub account with the private GitHub repo in either case.

The first approach passes the same ssh credentials you use locally to push, pull, and so on from the remote GitHub repo -- you uploaded your public key for your personal account, and that's what GitHub uses. To make this work when running on another server, you need to have ssh-agent running and use ssh-add to add your key to the agent -- then your personal GitHub credentials can be used to perform git commands.

The second approach is to allow the remote server(s) you're deploying to to have access to GitHub -- this may be elastic beanstalk or your actual server(s). Create a passwordless ssh key on the server (ssh-keygen -t rsa, accept defaults, or perhaps EB has a way of its own) then copy the generated public key contents and create a new "deploy key" containing that key in your GitHub repo -- you'll need to be admin, which I assume you are. An installed deploy key will allow the EB users to log into the remote server and do git pull and related commands (read-only) from the server.

I think the first method is more elegant and more easily managed as the number of servers you're deploying to grows, but which method you use may depend on EB's options.