Ok, I’m coming clean. Controlling access to our various servers has been a mess. Sure, we’ve stored passwords in a safe way (1Password for teams ftw!) but what happens if someone leaves the company or that root password somehow were to get out… Well, we did not have a plan for such a thing.

Sure, setting up ssh keys is easy, but we never got around to it. We manage more than a handful servers, and making sure the authorized_keys on these boxes is up to date just felt unmanageable.

This changed today when i got the idea to make use of this GitHub’s feature which exposes the public keys. I wrote a little script that fetches all users within our GitHub organization, pulls down the public keys and updates the ~.ssh/authorized_keys-file nightly with a cron job.

Yes, this is PHP but when all you’ve got is a hammer – everything looks like a nail. This needs some error handling too, but I thought I’d share it anyway.

 

/Peder