I have a fairly basic scenario. I made a dedicated ssh key for this purpose and added it to my repository secrets.
Code gets pushed to master
GitHub action uploads it to server using ssh by doing echo "${{ secrets.SSH_KEY }}" > key.
After that I can use this key to connect to my server e.g. ssh -i key devops@myserver.com lsb_release -a
The problem is that for some reason GitHub actions cannot write it to file, it writes characters *** instead of the actual secret value into the file. Therefore obviously I cannot connect to my server.
How can I connect with ssh using this secret? Is there a way to connect without using a file? Can someone who did this common scenario using GitHub actions shed some light?
The good solution is to use gpg for encrypting the key, adding it to a repo and decrypting it on the server using passphrase. The passprase should be stored as github project secret of course.
More info how I did it here: https://help.github.com/en/actions/automating-your-workflow-with-github-actions/creating-and-using-encrypted-secrets