provide-own-ssh-key.md

Providing your own SSH key

Flux connects to the repository using an SSH key it retrieves from a Kubernetes secret, if the configured (--k8s-secret-name) secret has no identity key/value pair, it will generate new private key.

With this knowledge, providing your own SSH key is as simple as creating the configured secret in the expected format.

1. create a Kubernetes secret from your own private key:

   kubectl create secret generic flux-git-deploy --from-file=identity=/full/path/to/private_key

   this will result in a secret that has the structure:

   apiVersion: v1
   data:
     identity: <base64 encoded RSA PRIVATE KEY>
   kind: Secret
   type: Opaque
   metadata:
     ...

2. (optional) if you created the secret with a non-default name (default: flux-git-deploy), set the --k8s-secret-name flag to the name of your secret (i.e. --k8s-secret-name=foo).

Note: the SSH key must be configured to have R/W access to the repository. More specifically, the SSH key must be able to create and update tags. E.g. in Gitlab, that means it requires Maintainer permissions. The Developer permission can create tags, but not update them.