Checkout a second branch during build

[ozdanborne]

I’m designing a (slightly convoluted) build process where I checkout multiple branches of the same repository during the build. I’m unable to get this working in Netlify’s build environment and wanted to verify that there’s no other way to do it before I give up:

• I tried git checkout origin/$secondBranch but the git repository is checked out in a detached head and has no other branches fetched locally.
• I tried git remote add origin $REPOSITORY_URL && git fetch origin but it seems the build environment isn’t set up with SSH access to the same repository.

Most of the docs online suggest using the https address of the repository but I cannot as it’s a private repo, and I’m not interested in giving Netlify a build token at the moment.

[fool]

Hi there and sorry it’s been awhile since you posted! I do not think this is going to work without SOME kind of authentication you provide during build process. See this article for more details:

[Support Guide] How do I access private repositories in the build environment?

Last reviewed by Netlify Support on December 2022 The link from your repository to our service only authenticates us against the “main” repo that you first configured, and won’t automatically allow access to submodules even if they also belong to you and you’ve granted Netlify access to those repositories. In case your submodule is public, you can change the URI schema for it to start with https://, and it should work without further adjustment (so, in .gitmodules, change git@github.com… to h…

I know you don’t want to use a token specifically, so you could also do something even more convoluted like this:

[Support Guide] Using an SSH key via environment variable during build

Last checked by Netlify Support Team: December 2022 Some workflows require use of an SSH private key during build - for instance, logging in to a server to restart your backend, or using git clone on a private repo during build. There are better ways to accomplish this goal for most use cases, but in case you choose to do that, below is an approach that can work. First, create an ssh key and add the public key (shorter one) to your service (e.g. on your GitHub repo settings, or in ~/.ssh/auth…

…but it still boils down to “you have to get authentication details into the build shell somehow”.

Everything else I can think of is even yet still more convoluted - can you make a submodule out of a different branch of this repo? If so you could use a deploy key in the intended way but my gosh that seems to be begging for a recursive explosion during checkout if it is even possible to configure.

So instead I’ll add your voice to a feature request to be able to customize a bit how we check things out. Could you clarify for me what you think would work better for your purposes? I know the “detached head without branches” isn’t working for you - do you happen to know what kind of checkout might work better? e.g. git clone --depth X or some other specification like that would be very helpful!