GPT github nightmare

I started this project in an effort to use AI as a learning tool, something more interactive than a video or text based guide.. It turned out to be an absolute nightmare. It started as a me thing, I was following GPT to the letter, the problem arose when using GPT to figure out how to apply secrets in github to my repo. Github as you probably know uses the secrets to secure sensitive bits of your config so it’s not floating around in the deploy.yaml in plain text for all to see.

GPT didn’t tell me how this worked and instead gave me a list of secrets to dump into github, but no clear instructions on how this should be structured. So I took my info all in one secret, and saved it, easy!.. except not. Github has a field to name the secret, and then the secret itself, the deploy.yaml looks for the NAME of the secret to pull it’s content, I didn’t know this so queue several hours of me fighting this only to come across the idea out of pure frustration to seperate the secrets into individual secrets instead of one big secret file, I didn’t get it right, but I accidentally named one incorrectly, and it matched a variable in the deploy.yaml, and when it tried to build, I could see it putting the wrong secret in!

So I deleted all my secrets from github, then recrated them with the correect naming schema and bam.. nothing worked but it wasn’t giving me errors about paths not existing, not being able to reach my host, etc.

The new error was that it could attempt to connect, but that the ssh key was incorrect.. this led to at least 14 hours of me hunting for exta spaces, special characters, ghosts, and possibly Amelia Earhart.. GPT was going in circles and just repeating the same suggestions over and over, sometimes without any tweaks at all! Then I stumbled upon a post talking about RSA Vs ed25519 and how github seems to hate the latter.

Queue me switching to RSA for the ssh and bam!, suddenly it worked! Leading us to here, where at the time of writing this page won’t appear as the Astro config doesn’t actually change pages when clicking links and I’m at a loss how to fix that. If you see this, that means I got it fixed and there will be another post of me ranting endlessly about how it worked locally but fails when pushed to my server.

Until then my friends, David R.

*Heres a snippet of my email notifications from github at 1:20am..on a work night