As always, RailsConf was a great experience this year. For the fourth time, we gave the FastRuby.io Rails Upgrade Workshop. It was actually my 2nd time participating in running the workshop, and my co-worker, Fiona’s 1st time.

Each time we run the workshop, we like to bring in a new co-presenter, so different members of our team can have the opportunity to present at RailsConf.

If you search online for using SSH keys with Docker, to access private Github repositories, you will get a lot of search results, but the solutions you’ll find are almost all out of date, insecure, or fragmentary (i.e. they provide a small snippet of information but not a complete solution). Given how popular both Docker and Github are, I found this quite surprising. We recently had to set up Docker with a Rails application that fetches gems from private repositories. We’re also using Docker Compose, which added to the challenge. This comment on the Docker project, which is from February 2021, unfortunately is still accurate:

There are several questions and answers out there about how to pull from a private repository (using the hosts ssh key & config). A lot of them are not working, not secure or unanswered

After several hours of research and testing, we have a good solution to share. But first let’s take a look at the different approaches to consider.

The Opportunity Scholars & Guides program is one of the least known and also one of the best aspects of RubyConf and RailsConf:

Opportunity Scholars (Scholars) are new to the Ruby community and looking to make professional connections. Scholars are typically students, new professionals, and/or members of underrepresented tech communities (women, BIPOC, etc.) interested in starting a career in the technology sector. Scholars are paired with a Guide (mentor) who can help them get the most out of the conference, and offer insight and advice on Ruby programming and working as a developer… Due to the generous donation from our conference sponsors and supporters, we are delighted to offer a limited amount of financial support for Scholars’ transportation and/or accommodation.