Integrating with GitHub¶
In this guide, we’ll link a private GitHub repository to a Valohai project using a deploy key.
Alternative: Authenticate with GitHub Apps
You can also link private GitHub repositories through GitHub Apps authorization if you don’t wish to create keys and manage the secrets yourself. You will find Link to a GitHub repository in the project’s repository settings.
Requirements
A private GitHub repository
A Valohai project
A tool that generates SSH keys. This guide uses
ssh-keygen
Generate an SSH key pair¶
Use ssh-keygen
to create a new SSH key pair.
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -N '' -f my-project-deploy-key
This will generate two files:
my-project-deploy-key.pub
is the public key you add to GitHub.my-project-deploy-key
is the private key you add to Valohai.
Don’t include the keys in your version control
You should not include these keys in the version control. Anybody that gains access to the my-project-deploy-key
file contents will have read access to your repository, so use appropriate caution.
Add the public key to GitHub¶
Find the my-project-deploy-key.pub
file we generated in the last section, and it should contain one line that starts with ssh-rsa AAAA...
. This line is the public key that we’ll be adding to GitHub.
Now go to your GitHub repository and navigate to the add deploy key page through Settings > Deploy keys > Add deploy key.

Add new deploy key¶
Copy and paste the contents of
my-project-deploy-key.pub
into the Key field.Give the deploy key an identifying Title such as Valohai.
Valohai doesn’t require write access, make sure that is off.

Add the private key to Valohai¶
Go to app.valohai.com and navigate to the repository settings in your Valohai Project through Settings > Repository.

To make sure you get the correct repository URL, open GitHub in another tab. On Github, navigate to Code page and press Clone or download.
Make sure you have Clone with SSH active on the popup window. If it reads Clone with HTTPS, click the Use SSH button next to the text.
Then copy the text field with git@github.com:<owner>/<repository>.git

Next paste the SSH URL (git@github.com:<owner>/<repository>.git
) into the URL field.
On your local machine, find the my-project-deploy-key
file (without the .pub
extension) we generated before. It should contain multiple lines starting with -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
or something similar. The contents of this file are the private key we’ll be adding to Valohai.
Copy and paste the contents of my-project-deploy-key
into the SSH private key field.

After you click Save, Valohai links the GitHub repository to the project and automatically fetches your code.
After you add new commits to your GitHub repository, remember to press the Fetch repository to update the code in Valohai.
