Deploy to GitHub repositories in TravisCI Jobs

Introduction

By using GitHub deploy keys you can safely push to GitHub repositories, or read private GitHub repositories.

Configuration

Let’s assume that:

• your GitHub user name / organization name is
• your GitHub repository name is
• your are going to encrypt the private key with

Generate a private key

• Install OpenSSH on your system (or in a Virtual Machine, Docker container, WSL, …)
• Generate an RSA private key without a passphrase:

  ssh-keygen -b 4096 -t rsa -N "" -C "Deploy key for username/reponame" -f github_deploy_key
  

• Encrypt the private key

  openssl aes-256-cbc -e -in github_deploy_key -pass 'pass:your encryption password' -md sha256 -out github_deploy_key.enc

Add the key to the GitHub deploy keys

Go to https://github.com/username/reponame/settings/keys/new and enter this data:

• Title
  a name of your choice
• Key
  paste the contents of the github_deploy_key.pub file
• Allow write access
  check this if you will need to push to the repository

Add the decryption password to TravisCI

• Go to https://travis-ci.org/username/reponame/settings
• In the Environment Variables section, add a new variable with:
  • Name
    DEPLOYKEY_PASSWORD
  • Value
    your encryption password

Add the encrypted key to your repository

Add the github_deploy_key.enc file file to your repository.
By default, you can save it as .travis/github_deploy_key.enc

Configure the TravisCI job

• If you didn’t save the encrypted key as .travis/github_deploy_key.enc, define an environment variable named DEPLOYKEY_FILE whose value is the relative path to the encrypted key
• Invoke the following code to load the key so that GIT has (write) access to the repository:

  wget -q -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlocati/travisci-github-deploy-key/master/load-deploy-key.sh | sh
  

Credits

From a great idea by @B3rn475.