Hi there and sorry it’s been awhile since you posted! I do not think this is going to work without SOME kind of authentication you provide during build process. See this article for more details:
I know you don’t want to use a token specifically, so you could also do something even more convoluted like this:
…but it still boils down to “you have to get authentication details into the build shell somehow”.
Everything else I can think of is even yet still more convoluted - can you make a submodule out of a different branch of this repo? If so you could use a deploy key in the intended way but my gosh that seems to be begging for a recursive explosion during checkout if it is even possible to configure.
So instead I’ll add your voice to a feature request to be able to customize a bit how we check things out. Could you clarify for me what you think would work better for your purposes? I know the “detached head without branches” isn’t working for you - do you happen to know what kind of checkout might work better? e.g. git clone --depth X or some other specification like that would be very helpful!