Cloning a Private Repository in a GitHub Workflow

When working with GitHub workflows it’s possible to checkout different repositories to the one that the workflows are present in. However if the source repository is private you’ll get a not found error when trying to clone it even if the target repository is in the same organisation as the source.

It’s possible to use a personal access token as authentication to allow access but a safer option is to use a deployment key. For this you need to generate the SSH keys locally, add the public key as a deployment key to the private repo and add the private key as a secret to the repo you want to clone the private repo to.

SSH keys can be generated with the below command as described here.

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email@example.com"

Once the keys have been added you can clone the repository in your workflow like so.

- uses: actions/checkout@v3
  with:
    ssh-key: ${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}
    repository: organization_name/repo_name