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GitLab SSH Proxy

One if the issue with running a GitLab instance in a container is to expose the GitLab SSH in the host machine without conflicting with the existing SSH port (22) on the host.

What usually happens:

git://git@hostname:2222/username/project.git

We want them to look like this instead:

git://git@hostname/username/project.git

There are several alternatives online (see References below). But I would like to avoid:

  • Hardcoding the UID and GID of any account in the host machine
  • Running additional services/daemon in the host machine
  • Providing Docker access to a special account in the host machine
  • Duplicating GitLab's authorized_keys files in the host machine

For a detailed explanation, see the How Does It Work section below.

Step by Step

Build and install.

sudo ./setup.sh install

It will do the following things:

  1. Copy the follwoing scripts to /usr/local/bin
  2. Build and install an SE Linux policy module: gitlab-ssh.te to allow scripts executed from the SSH daemon to run the ssh binary.
  3. Copy 99-gitlab-proxy.conf to /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/

Create the git user on the host

sudo useradd -m git

Create a new SSH key-pair

sudo su - git -c "ssh-keygen -t ed25519"

Assuming the GitLab container was started with --volume /srv/gitlab/ssh:/gitlab-data/ssh:Z, copy and rename the public key to /srv/gitlab/ssh/authorized_keys.

sudo cp /home/git/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub /srv/gitlab/ssh/authorized_keys

Fix the permission/ownership of the authorized_keys file to ensure that is only readable by the git user within the container. Otherwise SSH won't use the file.

# If you are using Docker, substitute podman with docker
podman exec -it gitlab /bin/sh -c \
    "chmod 600 /gitlab-data/ssh/authorized_keys; chown git:git /gitlab-data/ssh/authorized_keys"

Reload the SSH Service

sudo systemctl reload sshd

You're good to go!

Configuration

By default the scripts assumes that the GitLab SSH service is accessible at git@localhost port 2222. If your setup is different, you can override this by creating a file named gitlab-ssh.conf in /home/git/.config or /etc.

In this file you can define the following environment variables:

GITLAB_HOST=git@localhost
GITLAB_PORT=2222

Uninstall

This will remove all the script files and the SE Linux proxy module.

sudo ./setup.sh remove

How Does it Work

First we would need to have a git user in the host machine. When a user connects via SSH, it should be able to somehow redirect/forward the request as the git user in the container.

GitLab authenticates users based on their SSH keys. This is traditionally done by adding the user's public key into an authorized_keys file. Recently GitLab foregoes this file and uses a database instead. To do this GitLab uses a feature in the Open SSH server called AuthorizedKeysCommand which allows it to execute a program to query its keys database and return the relevant key data.

In the host, we do the same thing. We configure the AuthorizedKeysCommand to call our gitlab-keys-check script when someone tries to login as git. This script runs ssh to the container (via port 2222) and execute the actual tool, gitlab-shell-authorized-keys-check. It would return an authorized_keys entry which looks like this:

command="/opt/gitlab/embedded/service/gitlab-shell/bin/gitlab-shell key-1",no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABgQDJEO... username@hostname

The command option at the beginning forces the SSH server to execute /opt/.../bin/gitlab-shell when the key is used to login. This command does not exist in the host machine. Therefore before we return it we must replace this with /usr/local/bin/gitlab-shell-proxy.

command="/usr/local/bin/gitlab-shell-proxy key-1",no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABgQDJEO... username@hostname

The SSH server will see the updated command and execute gitlab-shell-proxy. This script will ssh to the container and execute the actual binary /opt/.../bin/gitlab-shell, effectively creating a proxy to the GitLab container.

For this to work, the git user in the host would need to have an authorized_key in the GitLab container. Therefore copy its public key file into /gitlab-data/ssh/authorized_keys in the container. We also need to adjust the file permission as Open SSH is quite strict about it.

There is one complication. In machines with SE Linux enabled, we are unable to execute ssh from the AuthorizedKeysCommand. To workaround this, we would need to install a custom policy file gitlab-ssh.te to enable this.

References