Pulling from a private GitHub repo within a Travis build

I've had to do this recently, so this is at least partly an aide-memoire.

06 March 2017

The easiest way to inline clone a github repo in a Travis build is something you might be interested in if your project is split across multiple repos, or has a configuration or data dependency that is a separate git repo. Whatever the reason, there are several courses of action available according to the Travis Private Dependency docs.

I’ve found the easiest - for bundler scripts that include private repos as well, I should add - way is to follow their advice for creating a travis user in github. Enable read access for this user - whatever you’ve named it - then get the username and password for this user you’ve created and make a note of them.

Then gem install travis locally to get the travis command line tools. After that, it’s as simple as doing

travis sshkey --generate -r <your-org>/<your-private-repo> --debug --pro

Then when prompted, supply your travis user github username and password, NOT your personal username and password.

Username: travis-ci-user-name
Password for travis-ci-user-name: ****

If you’re pulling in a private depedency via bundler or a build system, then good news - you’re done. However, if you want to do something inline, like pull in a repo of fixture data to a relative path of ./data from your current working directory, then you’ll need to do a bit more.

Make a script named say, pull_data.sh in a ./travis directory, and add the following to it:

Save, and add this to your .travis.yml - probably in your before-script block.

- sudo chown -R travis ./travis/pull_data.sh
- sudo chmod +x ./travis/pull_data.sh
- ./travis/pull_data.sh

Boom, you’re done. Private dependency pulled on the fly, outside of a build system, using an sshkey only for access to a single repo.

Pulling from a private GitHub repo within a Travis build

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