Overview

One of the several uses of the CircleCI CLI is to run jobs locally. However, it is currently not possible to add SSH keys using the add_ssh_keys CLI command.

Essentially, in this case, you'll need to pass some form of credentials into the container.

Basic authentication

You can set your VCS username/password as environment variables and pass them to the CLI with the -e flag, for each variable. This would allow you to clone the repository with basic authentication.

SSH key

Alternatively, you can base64-encode the private key and pass it into the job as an environment variable as well. Then you can decode it into a file within a run command in your custom local config. Once decoded into a file, you can use ssh-add -K path/to/key. This would allow you access to the remote repository through SSH key-based authentication.

Disclaimer: We are currently working on a more sustainable solution to checkout private repositories with local jobs. This workaround is only temporary

Additional Resources:

• Debug Local Builds Using the CircleCI CLI