How to fix a permission denied (publickey) error for a git submodule update in the Github Travis CI build?

git github git-submodules travis-ci
Quadroid picture Quadroid · Mar 28, 2013 · Viewed 14.5k times · Source

I cannot update the git submodule, with the error:

$ git submodule init
Submodule 'build/html' ([email protected]:quadroid/clonejs.git) registered for path 'build/html'
...
$ git submodule update
Cloning into 'build/html'...
Warning: Permanently added 'github.com,207.97.227.239' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

But when I do the same tasks locally, everything is OK.

How do I fix this so that the Travis CI build passes and I can still click on the submodule in the repo to direct to it?

Answer

aknuds1 picture aknuds1 · Jul 6, 2014

This can (thankfully) be easily solved by modifying the .gitmodules file on-the-fly on Travis, so that the SSH URL is replaced with the public URL, before initializing submodules. To accomplish this, add the following to .travis.yml:

# Handle git submodules yourself
git:
    submodules: false
# Use sed to replace the SSH URL with the public URL, then initialize submodules
before_install:
    - sed -i 's/[email protected]:/https:\/\/github.com\//' .gitmodules
    - git submodule update --init --recursive

Thanks to Michael Iedema for his gist from which I derived this solution.

If your submodules are private repositories, it should work to include credentials in the https URLs, I recommend making a GitHub access token with restricted permissions for this purpose:

# Replace <user> and <token> with your GitHub username and access token respectively
- sed -i 's/[email protected]:/https:\/\/<user>:<token>@github.com\//' .gitmodules

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