could not parse private key: Invalid Key: Key must be PEM encoded PKCS1 or PKCS8 private key

[cswendrowski]

I am using the latest Dockerhub image for policy-bot and cannot successfully start the container to the error Error: failed to initialize Github app client: could not parse private key: Invalid Key: Key must be PEM encoded PKCS1 or PKCS8 private key

I have attempted to use various formats for the .pem generated by Github, such as:

private_key: "-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MIIEpAIBAAKCAQEArjfzbTEsi4kxQTi73Weh9zKmxCZ7nu3osRUM7ovd1XEnRK6z
. . .
HH3A+JuNscHTnGjTm2dmaTjTyEnCQxNQ8Z0NSxKVytOAymxXiiSyxg==
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----"

Putting it all on one line or removing the -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- and -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY----- does not work as well.

I took a look through the code to try and see what I was doing wrong, but unfortunately I have never worked with Go before and only got as far as determining that you are somewhere converting the base64 content into a byte array

[asvoboda]

Hey @cswendrowski

I think the docs could use some updates here, but it should be an issue of formatting the private key with the right indentation:

github:
  app:
    private_key: |
      -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
      ...
      -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

Note that the | character denotes this is a multi-line yaml string.

[cswendrowski]

Thanks for the quick response!

That did the trick, this section now loads correctly:

    # The private key of the GitHub app
    private_key: |
      -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
      MIIEpAIBAAKCAQEArjfzbTEsi4kxQTi73Weh9zKmxCZ7nu3osRUM7ovd1XEnRK6z
      . . .
      HH3A+JuNscHTnGjTm2dmaTjTyEnCQxNQ8Z0NSxKVytOAymxXiiSyxg==
      -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
    oauth:

Thanks kindly