Hi, @AaronNBrock. It could if we still had a valid SSH key to connect to GitHub with. However, after the repo is cloned, our build image immediately forgets the SSH key required for GitHub access. This means that SSH based cloning (even of public repos) will fail. The HTTPS method requires no SSH key and it will still work if the repo is public.
Why do we drop the SSH key after cloning? It is a security measure so that if your site build were somehow to include malicious code, that code wouldn’t be able to steal the SSH key information.
If you do require SSH cloning of private repositories after the initial clone, that can be done. There is documentation about that process here: