Cloning a private Github repo using SSH auth in Rust has proved to be a pretty gnarly problem (for my anyway), so I thought I'd share this quick tutorial to help anyone else out that might be struggling with the same issue. I'm using git2-rs which has good interface documentation, but very few pieces of example code, so I set out to fix that somewhat with this post.

Header photo by Mark Wilson

Boosh. Straight in:

let repo_url = "git@github.com:jamwaffles/git2-rs-github-clone-demo.git";
let repo_clone_path = "workspace/";

println!("Cloning {} into {}", repo_url, repo_clone_path);

let mut builder = RepoBuilder::new();
let mut callbacks = RemoteCallbacks::new();
let mut fetch_options = FetchOptions::new();

callbacks.credentials(|_, _, _| {
	let credentials =
		Cred::ssh_key(
			"git",
			Some(Path::new("/Users/jwaples/.ssh/id_rsa.pub")),
			Path::new("/Users/jwaples/.ssh/id_rsa"),
			None
		).expect("Could not create credentials object");


	Ok(credentials)
});

fetch_options.remote_callbacks(callbacks);

builder.fetch_options(fetch_options);

let repo = builder.clone(repo_url, Path::new(repo_clone_path)).expect("Could not clone repo");

println!("Clone complete");

// Do things with `repo` here

The key here is the Cred::ssh_key() call. This will load a SSH key from your filesystem (don't forget to change the path) and attach it to the clone request as part of the RemoteCallbacks object. The callbacks are in turn attached to the fetch options which are passed to the builder. This rather convoluted chain is what got me so confused.

A full demo of this code on Github. The code there will clone the repo itself to a folder called workspace/. Ironically the repo is public, but you could fork it and make your fork private if you want to test it properly.