This page guides you through passing Git and Docker authentication to Earthly builds, to empower related Earthly features, like GIT CLONE or FROM.

Git authentication

A number of Earthly features use Git credentials to perform remote Git operations:

• Resolving a build context when referencing remote targets

• The GIT CLONE command

There are two possible ways to pass Git authentication to Earthly builds:

• Via SSH agent socket (for SSH-based authentication)

• Via username-password (usually for https Git URLs)

SSH agent socket

SSH agent socket passing is configured by default and it should just work. It uses the environment variable SSH_AUTH_SOCK to detect where the SSH agent socket is located and mounts that socket to the BuildKit daemon container. (As an exception, on Mac, Docker's compatibility SSH auth socket is used instead).

If you need to override the SSH agent socket, you can set the environment variable EARTHLY_SSH_AUTH_SOCK to point to an alternative SSH agent.

In order for the SSH agent to have the right credentials available, make sure you run ssh-add before executing Earthly builds.

Another key setting is the auth mode for the git site that hosts the repository. By default earthly automatically default to ssh authentication if the ssh auth agent is running and has at least 1 key loaded, otherwise earthly will fallback to using non-authenticated https.

Sites can be explicitly added to the earthly config file under the git section in order to override the auto-authentication mode:

git:
    git.example.com:
        auth: ssh

Username-password authentication

Username-password based authentication can be configured in the earthly config file under the git section:

git:
    github.com:
        auth: https
        user: <username>
        password: <password>
    gitlab.com:
        auth: https
        user: <username>
        password: <password>

Alternatively, environment variables can be set which will be override all host entries from the config file:

• GIT_USERNAME

• GIT_PASSWORD

However, environment variable authentication are now deprecated in favor of using the configuration file instead.

Self-hosted and private Git Repositories

Currently, github.com, gitlab.com, and bitbucket.org have been tested as SCM providers; we have experimental support for self-hosted git repositories such as github enterprise which will need to be configured using a regular expression:

git:
    ghe.internal.mycompany.com:
        pattern: 'ghe.internal.mycompany.com/([^/]+)/([^/]+)'
        substitute: 'ssh://[email protected]:22/\$1/\$2.git'
        auth: ssh

Docker authentication

Docker credentials are used in Earthly for inheriting from private images (via FROM) and for pushing images (via SAVE IMAGE --push).

Docker authentication works automatically out of the box. It uses the same Docker libraries to infer the location of the credentials on the system and optionally invoke any necessary credentials store helper to decrypt them.

Manually

All you have to do as a user is issue the command

docker login --username <username>

before issuing earthly commands, if you have not already done so in the past. If you run into troubles, you can find out more about docker login here.

Credential Helpers

Docker can use various credential helpers to automatically generate and use credentials on your behalf. These are usually created by cloud providers to allow Docker to authenticate using the cloud provders own credentials.

You can see examples of configuring Docker to use these, and working with Earthly here:

• ​Pushing and Pulling Images with AWS ECR​

• ​Pushing and Pulling Images with GCP Artifact Registry​

• ​Pushing and Pulling Images with Azure ACR​

See also

• The earthly command reference​