Generate a deploy key for private submodules on Netlify now in the UI

[charlie]

We’re excited to announce we’ve just released a new feature allowing you to generate a deploy key for your site.

A deploy key is needed if your site repo includes private submodules. Until now, a key could only be created by requesting it from our Support team but, to improve this experience, we’ve added a section in a site’s settings to allow you to generate one yourself.

To access this feature, log into the app, navigate to a site, select the Settings tab, click on the Build & Deploy section and scroll down to Deploy key.
Click on the Generate public key button to create a new public deploy key. You can then copy & paste it in your git provider.

Check out the docs to learn more, and comment below if you have further questions.

[johtso]

I’ve just tried to add a second submodule to my site, and it seem that it’s not going to work. Netlify only lets you generate a single deploy key, and github doesn’t let you use the same deploy key more than once.

Is there a solution?

[dpcY]

I have a similar issue - did you get anywhere with this?

[luke]

Hi, @johtso and @dpcY. We do explain a workaround for this in the support guide below:

[Support Guide] How do I access private repositories in the build environment?

Last reviewed by Netlify Support on December 2022 The link from your repository to our service only authenticates us against the “main” repo that you first configured, and won’t automatically allow access to submodules even if they also belong to you and you’ve granted Netlify access to those repositories. In case your submodule is public, you can change the URI schema for it to start with https://, and it should work without further adjustment (so, in .gitmodules, change git@github.com… to h…

Quoting:

4. You can use this workflow with multiple private submodules attached to the same repository, but that does take some extra work since GitHub does not allow Deploy Keys to be used in multiple places. You’ll have to instead add them to a user (perhaps you? or maybe a robot-account that you create on GitHub) that has access to all repos.

Will that solution work for you? If there are other questions, please let us know.