SSH connection to AWS from Gitlab CI

In this tutorial, I will show you how to establish an SSH connection from a Gitlab CI server to another server. It is not necessary for the other server to have the Gitlab CI runner installed.

The ssh command includes the StrictHostKeyChecking flag. If this flag is set to no, the ssh client will automatically add host keys to the ~/.ssh/known_hosts file and will accept to connect to hosts whose host key has changed. This is why we create the .ssh folder and set the right permission to it.

Resources:

Using SSH keys with GitLab CI/CD -

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[vdespa]

👉 Want to learn more about CI/CD and DevOps? Check my Gitlab CI online course.

[mykolaskucinskas]

A really great video. Exactly what I was looking for.
Is it safe to use put contents from .pem file into a variable without masking it? GitLab does not allow me to mask the variable.

[shishirpandey]

Another amazing tutorial @valentin. Thanks!!
I have got one quick ask. lets say instead of having two commands touch and unzip in single job/stage can we have them separately in different jobs/stages? in such scenario will ssh command need to run for each job/stage ? OR the ssh connection established at first job/stage will be available to second job/stage as well ?? can you please help me with such example pipeline ?? Thanks!!

[Rohitsingh]

At 2:53 which key is that is it the ssh key of my remote server on which i want to deploy my code? I am getting enter Passphrase error, however i cannot use a key without a passphrase, is there any workaround?

[opusdei]

Thank you for this video, it was clear and good

[abrahanzarza]

Thanks for this video! It's so useful and clear.

[Zefr]

Thanks for this vid, I have a question, is it possible to port the "before script" in windows without the Docker?

[satyasai]

Thanks for the video and i have a question, If i want to deploy from gitlab to testing server(not in aws ..own server) using ci/cd whar is the steps to follow.

[dawidpolakowski]

Hi Valentin, great content I love your videos, tell me is this possible to use ssh key to clone from another private project?

[AlessandroPiccione]

Is the "-s" required for ssh-agent ? The man says the default output is already for Bash and normal shell.

[benhopakcheungben]

Hi Valentin, I'm facing a issue that "[my-domain] port 22: Operation timed out" or "Permission denied (publickey)". Hence could I know any security I need to setup for the gitlab-ci to access the aws via SSH? thanks so much, your tutorial is so useful to me.

However, I can use the ssh -i [pem file] [user]@[DNS] to access the server.

[vanshikasharma]

Can you please tell which EC2 instance have you used ? linux or ubuntu! Since my gitlab deploy is passed but on putting the ip address the page is not there

[keerthirajasj]

How to deploy the same if machine is behind the bastion host. My aws instance is behind bastion which I finding it difficult to run task which I tried like tricky way like adding SSH/conf in the runner but didnt work can u please suggest if any way to do so.

[RahulYadav-nkwp]

Hi, what if I don't want to use alpine image, I just want to deploy my react app on a shared runner using docker node.js image. Can I use the before_script here?

[abduljaleel]

Your video is useful. I am stuck at security group point. If i allow ssh port on my server side open, i am able to deploy from gitlab.
once i restrict with specific IP to ssh, i could not deploy from gitlab. is there any specific IP for gitlab to whitelist and add on my ec2 server security group?

Thanks in advance..

[amrukarim]

Hi Valentin, how to deploy multiple VMs? And store the list of VMs on variable

[martinsauer]

Im new to this.
Can I technically configure a .gitlab-ci.yml file in a way that whenever I save changes to a repository (so after every commit) on GitLab that all the files in the repository are sent to an ssh server I use. Then it gets compiled via predefined commands on a Linux machine. And then the executable compiled file gets saved to the repository in a new folder.

So basically if I create a Helloworld.c file in C. After I commit it to the GitLab repository it should be sent to a Linux ssh server. Get compiled and also added to the repository

I just want a yes or no. If this work I will figure it out myself. Thanks :)

[anampatel]

how have u setted the private key n from where?

[anoj]

Can you show us how to make it with the default ssh executor runner

[AlessandroPiccione]

As I know GitLab does not still have a way to share the image between the stages.
In my case I noticed I can save a full minute just using the same stage for build and deploy. It is perfectly fine especially when the image is the same like in this case ("alpine").