I am trying to create an ssh ppk login for gitlab.com that is not linked to any seated user account. I’ll have one for each server that runs our automated builds/tests. These logins shouldn’t expire when a gitlab user is deleted, and all activity from them should be logged as the server user not as a particular seated user (developer).
All I see is a way to manage Access tokens, SSH & GPG keys through my user settings. Paying for a seat just for a server to have its own login credentials is absurd and we won’t do it.
An SSH key has to belong to a user as how else will the gitlab.com server know who is attempting to connect?
This is the same for any type of SSH connection. If I want to connect to all my servers over SSH I must have a user account and an SSH key. This is not unique to gitlab this is how SSH works.
Better would be create a restricted access token to limit what the token can do under your account or under the project and use that on your servers over https instead of ssh.
Ok I will clarify. The key should not be linked to a seated user. I.e. A user that we’re paying for.
Unfortunately if you have a subscription, then no matter what users they have, they are all paid users - even if they don’t work on the code and just create issues. If you were using Gitlab-CE, or Gitlab-EE without the premium features, eg: without a license - then this also wouldn’t be an issue since you wouldn’t have to pay for any users. But once you have a subscription, all users require to be paid for irrespective of what they do.
This has been brought up before, especially when the Starter subscription was dropped a year or so ago, effectively making Premium the entry level subscription. Gitlab don’t yet have the ability to allow you to pay for the users that actually do something, vs users that would be used for system/build purposes.
Gotcha, thanks! For anyone else reading, it seems like there’s a close-to-desirable option with project access tokens, although for us with the number of repos it’s not practical Project access tokens | GitLab