Deployment using ssh with key without providing passphrase for private key (ssh-agent)

Question

Wherein lies the difference between Capistrano and Rocketeer when it comes to the passphrase for a private key?

I already have both Capistrano and Rocketeer deployment strategies set up properly and working. Capistrano lets ssh-agent provide the passphrase - Rocketeer, as it seems, does not. The question is not about how but why the passphrase is needed.

Background:

I want to use Rocketeer for deployment of a Laravel application instead of Capistrano. It seems as if it delegates the SSH connection to Laravel.

After setting only the remote server's name in the configuration and running a check, after some prompts for credentials Rocketeer stores the needed passphrase and the path to my desired private key in a non-version-controlled file.

I do not want to have credentials for establishing a SSH connection stored on my disk - especially not the passphrase to any of my private keys.

So, why is anything more than the server's name required?

I see that Laravel has those fields prepared in its remotes config - I just could not find out which component is responsible eventually and why it does not leave the SSH connection completely to the system itself.

Is it Rocketeer , Laravel , Symfony , phpseclib or even php itself underneath that needs that many information for establishing a SSH connection?

Answer 1

It's Laravel's missing implementation of phpseclib's ssh-agent that requires that many information for establishing a SSH connection.

That's why Rocketeer does not allow to rely on the ssh-agent next to username/password and privatekey/passphrase authentication as does Capistrano.

A proposal was stated and merged to include phpseclib's undocumented implementation for using the ssh-agent instead of an explicit key.

Rocketeer would profit from this as it relies on said implementation of phpseclib in Laravel.

(Thanks to @hannesvdvreken, @ThomasPayer and @passioncoder for pointing in the right directions)

Answer 2

There are some thing you might want to know.

You can use the default app/config/remote.php or you can use the Rocketeer config.php that gets published under app/packages/anahkiasen/rocketeer .

I tend to use the Laravel file. I made a copy of that file into the app/config/development folder which is ignored by git with .gitignore . I only write down the passkey of my private key down in that file. It will get merged with the array in app/config/remote.php .

Here's my app/config/development/remote.php file:

return array(
    'connections' => array(
        'staging' => array(
            'keyphrase' => 'your-secret-here',
        ),
        'production' => array(
            'keyphrase' => 'your-secret-here',
        ),
    ),
);

Hope this helps.