SSH Agent Forwarding for Claude Code

Claude often needs to clone private repos or push commits. ccpod offers two ways to give the container access to your SSH credentials.

Agent forwarding (recommended)

ssh:
  agentForward: true
  mountSshDir: false

ccpod forwards your host’s SSH_AUTH_SOCK into the container. Claude can use any key your local agent has loaded — without those keys ever touching the container filesystem.

Requires ssh-agent to be running on the host with your keys added (ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519).

Safety check

If SSH_AUTH_SOCK contains :, ccpod rejects it before starting the container. The colon would corrupt the Docker bind-mount spec, so we fail fast rather than mount the wrong path.

Podman limitation

Agent forwarding is not supported with Podman. Podman on macOS runs inside a Linux VM, so the host’s Unix socket is inaccessible from within the VM. ccpod skips the bind and prints a warning. Use mountSshDir: true instead.

Mount ~/.ssh read-only

ssh:
  agentForward: false
  mountSshDir: true

Mounts your ~/.ssh directory read-only at /home/node/.ssh (the node user’s home — the user Claude and git run as). Use this when:

• The host doesn’t run an agent.
• You need access to ~/.ssh/config or known_hosts patterns.
• Agent forwarding doesn’t work for your setup (rare).

This is broader access than agent forwarding — the container can read every key file. Prefer agent forwarding when possible.

Both off

ssh:
  agentForward: false
  mountSshDir: false

The container has no SSH access. Cloning private repos won’t work. Use HTTPS + a token forwarded as an env var instead:

env:
  - GITHUB_TOKEN

Combining with restricted network

If you set network.policy: restricted, remember to add github.com (or your git host) to network.allow — SSH still needs to reach the host.