SSH port forwarding action

GitHub action to forward a remote connection to a local port over SSH.

Prerequisites

You must have a passwordless SSH key set up on the remote server.

Security

• Supply ssh-key as a secret in your workflow. The action writes it to $RUNNER_TEMP with strict permissions and removes it in a cleanup step.
• Host key checking is disabled by default (strict-host-key-checking: no); this simplifies ephemeral runners but makes you vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Provide known-hosts or set strict-host-key-checking: yes in sensitive scenarios.
• The action cleans up the temporary key on success or failure and kills the SSH process when the job exits.

Github Action Inputs

Variable	Description
ssh-key	SSH private key
ssh-host	SSH host
ssh-port	SSH port, 1-65535 (default: 22)
ssh-user	SSH user
local-port	Local port (1-65535)
remote-host	Remote host
remote-port	Remote port (1-65535)
known-hosts	(optional) contents to append to ~/.ssh/known_hosts
strict-host-key-checking	(yes/no) SSH StrictHostKeyChecking setting; defaults to no

Example Usage

jobs:
  job_id:
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v6

      - uses: selfagency/ssh-port-forward-action@v2
        with:
          ssh-key: ${{ secrets.SSH_KEY }}
          ssh-host: your-host.com
          ssh-port: 22
          ssh-user: username
          local-port: 6379
          remote-host: localhost
          remote-port: 6379

      - run: redis-cli -p 6379 ping