Permit reading private key from environment variable

[nferch]

Has it been considered to permit reading the private key from an environment variable?

This would avoid it being written to disk, if you're using some other means to manage it, such as using a secrets management system, or in my case, invoking Puppet masterless remotely through Ansible.

From a cursory look at the code this looks pretty simple and invasive to implement, so if folks think this idea has wheels I'm happy to do a PoC.

[nferch]

@bastelfreak or perhaps @alexjfisher any thoughts?

[bastelfreak]

@nferch sounds like a good idea, could you please provide a patch for this?

[rismoney]

This would be great. Pub/private keys loadable via env vars solve a gap in containerization persistence.