Setting up local authentication

Before you can access or interact with hosted repositories from your system, you must set up local authentication in your environment.

After you set up local authentication, you can access hosted repositories for which you have the appropriate roles and permissions. You can also perform standard Git operations such as git clone, git pull, and git push. Local authentication isn't required to perform operations in the Google Cloud console, for example, to browse the contents of a repository.

Cloud Source Repositories supports the following types of authentication:

Authenticate by using SSH

Cloud Source Repositories lets you use SSH public key authentication to access hosted repositories. In this scenario, you first generate a key pair on the local system from which you want to access the repository. Then you register the public key with Google Cloud. If you already have an SSH key pair on your system, you can re-use those keys for authentication. You can register up to 20 public keys per Google Account.

Cloud Source Repositories supports three SSH key types:

  • RSA (only for keys with more than 2048 bits)
  • ECDSA
  • ED25519

Generate a key pair

The SSH key pair consists of a private key that resides on your local system and a public key that you register with Google Cloud.

Linux or macOS

  1. Ensure that OpenSSH is installed on your local system.

  2. At a command prompt, enter the following command:

    ssh-keygen -t [KEY_TYPE] -C "[USER_EMAIL]"
    

    Where:

    • [USER_EMAIL] is your email address.
    • [KEY_TYPE] is one of the following:
      • rsa
      • ecdsa
      • ed25519

    For example:

    ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "user@example.com"
    
    1. When prompted, enter a filename for the public key file. To accept the default ~/.ssh location, press Enter, otherwise specify a filename.

    2. When prompted, leave the passphrase empty and press Enter.

  3. Register your key

Windows

  1. Ensure that PuTTY is installed on your local system.

  2. From the Windows Start menu, start PuTTYGen.

  3. In the window that opens, select the key type from the Parameters field.

  4. Click Generate.

    PuTTYGen displays the generated public key string.

  5. Specify a passphrase to protect the key pair.

  6. To save the key pair you generated to your local system, click Save Public Key and Save Private Key.

Use existing keys

You can also use an existing key pair for SSH authentication.

Linux or macOS

By default, public key files are located in your ~/.ssh directory.

At a command prompt, enter the following command:

ls -a ~/.ssh

The default filenames are:

  • id_rsa.pub
  • id_ecdsa.pub
  • id_ed25519.pub

Windows

  1. From the Windows Start menu, start PuTTYGen.

  2. In the window that opens, click Load.

  3. Browse the local file system for your public key file and select the file.

    PuTTYGen displays the public key string. If you specified a passphrase when you saved the key file, PuTTYGen prompts you to enter it before you can view the public key.

Register a public key

  1. In the Google Cloud console, open the Manage SSH Keys page.

    Open Cloud Source Repositories

  2. Click Register SSH key.

    The Register SSH Key dialog opens.

  3. In the Key name field, type a unique name for the key.

  4. In the Key field, copy the key string from your public key file.

  5. Click Register.

After you set up SSH authentication, you can clone any repository for which you have the required roles and permissions, or push the contents of a local repository to an empty hosted repository.

Authenticate by using the gcloud CLI

Cloud Source Repositories lets you authenticate by using the gcloud CLI. In this scenario, you run the gcloud init command on your system to set up local authentication.

  1. Ensure that the gcloud CLI is installed on your local system.

  2. At a command prompt, run gcloud init:

    gcloud init
    
  3. Follow the instructions.

After you set up authentication by using the gcloud CLI, you can use standard Git commands to interact with the hosted repository on Cloud Source Repositories.

Authenticate by using manually generated credentials

You can also use manually generated credentials for authentication. Cloud Source Repositories provides a set of scripts you can use to manually generate the credentials you need to access hosted repositories.

  1. Go to the Configure Git page to generate your credentials.

    Go to the Configure Git page

  2. Open a terminal window.

  3. Type the following command:

    git clone https://source.developers.google.com/p/PROJECT_ID/r/REPOSITORY_NAME
    

    Where:

    • PROJECT_ID is the name of your project
    • REPOSITORY_NAME is the name of your repository

After you set up authentication with manually generated credentials, you can interact with the hosted repository on Cloud Source Repositories by using the standard Git commands.