Connect Gitlab using SSH

Setup GitLab SSH keys¶

• To setup and configure GitLab SSH keys for secure Git fetch, pull, push and clone operations, follow these steps:

Generate a GitLab SSH key pair on your personal computer.¶

• Both Ubuntu and Windows machines have built-in SSH support through the inclusion of the ssh-keygen tool.
• open PowerShell in Windows or a Linux terminal window on Ubuntu and issue the following command:

C:\gitlab\ssh\example> ssh-keygen -o -t rsa -C "ssh-EricYangGitlab"

1. ssh-keygen: This command is used to generate SSH keys. SSH keys are a pair of cryptographic keys used to authenticate a client to an SSH server. They consist of a public key (which is shared with the server) and a private key (which remains on the client).

2. -o: This option tells ssh-keygen to use the new OpenSSH format when saving the key. The OpenSSH format was introduced to provide better security and features compared to the older formats.

3. -t rsa: This option specifies the type of key to generate. In this case, it specifies RSA as the key type.

   • RSA is a widely-used public-key cryptosystem for secure data transmission.

4. -C "ssh-EricYangGitlab": This option allows you to add a comment to the key. Comments are useful for identifying the key, especially when you have multiple keys.

• By default, all GitLab SSH keys must go in an .ssh folder under the user’s home directory. Furthermore, a blank passphrase is acceptable unless your organization’s compliance rules state otherwise.

Add your public ssh key to GitLab¶

1. Copy the value of public key

   

2. Log into GitLab and click on your account preferences.

3. Click the SSH Keys link and paste the copied value into the text field.

   • Set an expiration date, and then click the blue button to persistently add the GitLab SSH key

   

Set config under the .ssh folder¶

Sometimes it will requires config setting to connect the gitlab server, if encounter error in next step, we can build a config file under the C:\User\yourname\.ssh, and put the following material:

Host gitlab.com
Hostname gitlab.com
User git
PreferredAuthentications publickey
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/gitlab_rsa

Issue a git clone command with the SSH URL¶

Once the connection is built, we can run any git command to manipulate our repo