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Get all SSH public keys from gitlab

Published: 26-08-2020 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article


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This small snippet gets all the SSH keys from a gitlab instance. You need to be an administrator, then you can query all keys at once using the API. On the web frontend you can only see the keys per user, not all at once in an overview.

[If you like this snippet, consider sponsoring me by trying out a Digital Ocean VPS. With this link you'll get $100 credit for 60 days). (referral link)][99]

I'm using jq to filter out specific fields of the JSON API output, but you can omit that and just use shell (awk/sed) if you want to.

SSH keys via the API

In [the API] you can query keys by ID. As far as I could find, there is no way to find out how many keys there are, so you have to gamble that a bit, in my case 500 was enough since the gitlab instace I used only has 400-ish users.

You also need a personal access token for your administrative account, which you can create via your gitlab profile, under Settings and then Access Tokens.

This is the full command:

for i in $(seq 1 500); do 
  curl --silent --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: $your_token_here" "https://your_gitlab_URL.com/api/v4/keys/$i" | \
  jq -M -c -r '[.key, .user.name]'  | \
  grep -v null ;  
done

Replace the token and domain name by your domain name.

Example output:

["ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1y[...]zmSDQ== key1","User Name"]
["ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1y[...]GaE6cC1 key2","User Name"]
["ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3N[...]9W key5", "Other User Name"]

You can use the |@sh or |@tsv output modifier to get rid of the quotes and square brackets:

for i in $(seq 1 500); do 
  curl --silent --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: $your_token_here" "https://your_gitlab_URL.com/api/v4/keys/$i" | \
  jq -M -c -r '[.key, .user.name]|@tsv'  | \
  grep -v null ;  
done

Output:

ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3N[...]9W  key5 Other User Name
Tags: bash , curl , git , gitlab , jq , json , shell , snippets , ssh