Git SSH with GitLab self-managed instances

August 9, 2019

GitLab Community Edition is open source. Anyone may host their own self-managed GitLab instance if desired instead of gitlab.com. Git SSH. For this example, we use Kitware’s CMake GitLab instance.

First, create an account on the self-managed GitLab instance and fork the desired repo. This will be available like

git clone https://gitlab.kitware.com/username/cmake

To git push using SSH, type:

git config --global url."ssh://gitlab.kitware.com/".pushInsteadOf https://gitlab.kitware.com/

Generate an SSH key–don’t reuse SSH keys between sites.

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f ~/.ssh/kitware

Go to the GitLab SSH Key page and add the contents of ~/.ssh/kitware.pub

Add to ~/.ssh/config:

Host gitlab.kitware.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/kitware

Now checkout a new branch, make your changes according to project guidelines and submit a merge request.