Overview

This article will explain how to pull from a golang private repo on gitlab using ssh. Although this is specifically using gitlab it should work for other repository providers.

Requirements

  • git
  • go
  • ssh

Setup

SSH

I won’t explain how to setup your keys, you can find that in other articles, here and on the web. You will however have to modify your ~/.ssh/config

[Edit ~/.ssh/config]

Host gitlab.example.com
  Hostname    gitlab.example.com
  User        git
  Port        9022

The values for the above will be specific to your installation, the hostname and port especially. The user value “git” I found to be necessary even though I will later add that value to my ~/.gitconfig.

Git

There’s two ways to redirect to the ssh port on gitlab, one by directly adding to ~/.gitconfig, the second is by calling “git config [options]”. I’ll show both.

Git config

Call the following, and change the host to your own host.

git config --global --add url."ssh://git@gitlab.example.com/".insteadOf "https://gitlab.example.com/"

If you only want it to work with specific repos, remove the global and call that in the gitlab folder you cloned.

Editing .gitconfig

Directly edit ~/.gitconfig and add the following

[url "ssh://git@gitlab.example.com/"]
	insteadOf = https://gitlab.example.com/

SSH Agent

You will need a ssh-agent setup for go to successfully pull private golang repos.

eval $(ssh-agent -s)
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

Your key maybe id_rsa, so replace that in the “ssh-add”

GoPrivate

Go does have the ability to pull from private repos but looks like it is more centered around private repos with https endpoints.

If you have that kind of repo you would use an access token and specify GOPRIVATE=gitlab.example.com [command]

This article doesn’t cover this scenario, so you won’t need to specify GOPRIVATE

Conclusion

You should be all setup now, the only final thing to do is run:

go get -v

Edits

  • [2024/08/16] Modified ~/.ssh/config example so Host and Hostname are the same