SSH key option for git

[bkmgit]

In section 12 personal access tokens are introduced. These are a GitHub feature, but are not used on other forges such as GitLab, Bitbucket, SourceHut, Forgejo etc. It would be helpful to indicate ssh keys as another and more widely supported method of interacting with remote git repositories.

[ilessing]

in an earlier revision of the lesson we had included SSH auth options. We found that learners were mostly unfamiliar with SSH key pair generation and the complexity of setting up SSH auth.

Given the intended audience for this workshop we wanted to focus on Github and found that the PAT authentication was least likely to give learners trouble during the workshop.

So, while I appreciate the input and suggestion I think it may be out of scope for this workshop.

@rcurty what do you think?

[bkmgit]

The earlier version seems to be at:
https://github.com/ilessing/Reproducible-Publications-with-RStudio/blob/main/_episodes/09-github.md

There are a number of other tutorials, for example:

• https://erikaduan.github.io/posts/2021-05-30-syncing-to-github/
• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/r-language/link-your-github-account-with-r-studio/
• https://happygitwithr.com/ssh-keys.html
• https://docs.ropensci.org/credentials/articles/intro.html

There is also an R package to help setup credentials:
https://cran.rstudio.com/web//packages/credentials/

It is probably at least worth mentioning that other git forges will use different types of authentication than PAT tokens
and pointing to resources for further study. Having ssh keys as an alternate option so that the instructor can choose what
is most appropriate would be ideal, but this also requires greater efforts for lesson maintenance.

[rcurty]

Hello @ilessing and @bkmgit:
I’m thinking of adding a callout to highlight other authentication methods as well. Does that sound good?

A Quick Note on GitHub Authentication Methods

In this lesson, we stick with Personal Access Tokens (PATs), but GitHub offers other ways to authenticate, such as SSH keys, and different Git forges (GitLab, Bitbucket, etc.) may use their own methods too. If you’re curious about other authentication options or how things differ across platforms, GitHub has a helpful overview here:
https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-account-and-data-secure/about-authentication-to-github

[bkmgit]

A callout would be great. SSH keys are available in every git forge since they are part of git.