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Deploy Tokens

Introduced in GitLab 10.7.

Deploy tokens allow to download (through git clone), or read the container registry images of a project without the need of having a user and a password.

Please note, that the expiration of deploy tokens happens on the date you define, at midnight UTC and that they can be only managed by maintainers.

Creating a Deploy Token

You can create as many deploy tokens as you like from the settings of your project:

  1. Log in to your GitLab account.
  2. Go to the project you want to create Deploy Tokens for.
  3. Go to Settings > Repository
  4. Click on "Expand" on Deploy Tokens section
  5. Choose a name and optionally an expiry date for the token.
  6. Choose the desired scopes.
  7. Click on Create deploy token.
  8. Save the deploy token somewhere safe. Once you leave or refresh the page, you won't be able to access it again.

Personal access tokens page

Revoking a deploy token

At any time, you can revoke any deploy token by just clicking the respective Revoke button under the 'Active deploy tokens' area.

Limiting scopes of a deploy token

Deploy tokens can be created with two different scopes that allow various actions that a given token can perform. The available scopes are depicted in the following table.

Scope Description
read_repository Allows read-access to the repository through git clone
read_registry Allows read-access to container registry images if a project is private and authorization is required.

Usage

Git clone a repository

To download a repository using a Deploy Token, you just need to:

  1. Create a Deploy Token with read_repository as a scope.

  2. Take note of your username and token

  3. git clone the project using the Deploy Token:

    git clone http://<username>:<deploy_token>@gitlab.example.com/tanuki/awesome_project.git

Replace <username> and <deploy_token> with the proper values.

Read Container Registry images

To read the container registry images, you'll need to:

  1. Create a Deploy Token with read_registry as a scope.
  2. Take note of your username and token
  3. Log in to GitLab’s Container Registry using the deploy token:
docker login registry.example.com -u <username> -p <deploy_token>

Just replace <username> and <deploy_token> with the proper values. Then you can simply pull images from your Container Registry.

GitLab Deploy Token

Introduced in GitLab 10.8.

There's a special case when it comes to Deploy Tokens. If a user creates one named gitlab-deploy-token, the username and token of the Deploy Token will be automatically exposed to the CI/CD jobs as environment variables: CI_DEPLOY_USER and CI_DEPLOY_PASSWORD, respectively. With the GitLab Deploy Token, the read_registry scope is implied.

After you create the token, you can login to the Container Registry using those variables:

docker login -u $CI_DEPLOY_USER -p $CI_DEPLOY_PASSWORD $CI_REGISTRY