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

Question

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 1

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 

Answer 2

I'd recommend using the https scheme for submodules, as that'll allow you to pull on Travis and push locally: https://github.com/quadroid/clonejs.git.