Specifying SSH Key

All server instances that are created are accessed via SSH using the ssh utility and therefore you must provide a valid SSH key using the --ssh-key option. If the --ssh-key option is not specified, then the ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub default key path will be used.

The SSH key will be automatically added to your project using the MD5 hash of the public key as the SSH key name.

❗Warning:	Given that each new SSH key is automatically added to your Hetzner project, you must manually delete them when no longer needed.

Most GitHub users already have an SSH key associated with the account. If you want to know how to add an SSH key, see Adding a new SSH key to your GitHub account article.

Generating a New SSH Key

If you need to generate a new SSH key, see Generating a new SSH key and adding it to the ssh-agent article.

SSH Keys in Cloud Deployment

If you are deploying the github-hetzner-runners program as a cloud service using the github-hetzner-runners <options> cloud deploy command, then after provisioning a new cloud server instance that will host the github-hetzner-runners service, a new SSH key will be auto-generated to access the runners. The auto-generated key will be placed in /home/runner/.ssh/id_rsa, where runner is the user under which the github-hetzner-runners service runs on the cloud instance. The auto-generated SSH key will be automatically added to your project using the MD5 hash of the public key as the SSH key name.