As development on Travis Pro, our continuous integration platform for private repositories, hums along we thought we’d give you an update on how things are going and what kind of new features make their way into it.

Last week we rolled out a new feature that’s pretty much invisible to the user, but still important to make Travis Pro more user-friendly: automatic generation of deploy keys for private GitHub repositories.

Why is this important? Private GitHub repositories can only be accessed using an SSH key (there’s a secret other way to access them, but we don’t dare talk about it in public). If we only rely on a user’s SSH key, that would compromise security by allowing access to all his repositories, so we need to add an SSH key that’s solely for Travis to use.

Until last week, our fall-back was to use a little script that generates a new deploy key for you and generates a .travis.yml file that includes the key and instructions on how to manually add it to your GitHub repository.

We were not happy with the fact that it’s more work for people to start using Travis Pro and that it could potentially compromise security should a customer decide to give an external party only access to a snapshot of the source code but not to the repository. Accidentally handing over the deploy key might grant unwanted access to the repository.

So we added a neat feature that automatically generates a deploy key for you and adds it to the repository, and only this particular repository. You’ll get an email from GitHub notifying you of the fact. When we receive a push from a repository that doesn’t have an SSH key in the .travis.yml or in our system yet, we generate one and update the repository configuration on GitHub with the new key.

That way we don’t break existing projects that still have a .travis.yml configured and still allow for you to specify a key in the .travis.yml if you need to.

If you’re already using Travis Pro and have your deploy key set up in the .travis.yml, there’s an easy way to migrate. Just delete the source_key from the .travis.yml and remove it from the GitHub deploy keys as well. We’ll automatically generate a new SSH key for your repository the next time you push a commit.

Curious about Travis Pro? You can still donate to our Love campaign to get on the fast track to using it before we launch it to the public! If you donated, just hit us up on support@travis-ci.org, and we’ll get you hooked up!