Non Base64-encoded private keys Deprecation Warning

[joshua-janicas]

I was testing out the new Meltano V (4.0.5) and running against target-snowflake. When I loaded data into Snowflake I saw this warning:

2025-11-10T17:25:01.341870Z [warning  ] C:\Git\elt-pipeline\.meltano\loaders\target-snowflake\venv\Lib\site-packages\target_snowflake\connector.py:261: DeprecationWarning: Use base64 encoded private key instead of PEM format
  connect_args["private_key"] = self.get_private_key()
 name=target-snowflake
2025-11-10T17:25:01.343485Z [info     ] Private key is in PEM format   name=target-snowflake     
2025-11-10T17:25:16.238606Z [info     ] Reader 'target-snowflake' completed processing 313 lines of input (2 schemas, 309 records, 0 batch manifests, 2 state messages, 0 activate version messages). name=target-snowflake

Not sure when things will break but thought I'd raise it here 😟 !

[edgarrmondragon]

Hi @joshua-janicas! There's isn't a timeline for removal yet.

Do you have strong reasons for not using a base64 encoded private key?

[joshua-janicas]

Apologies for my ignorance/confusion - but isn't these PEM format already in base 64 PK? Should I just remove the BEGIN/END PRIVATE KEY header and footer?

We have this key that we use for as service user to run all of our ELT (meltano + dbt) on, but we need to trim the BEGIN/END KEY like this:

resource "snowflake_service_user" "report_user" {
  name              = "ABC"
  disabled          = false
  display_name      = "ABC"
  login_name        = "ABC"
  default_warehouse = "WAREHOUSE"
  rsa_public_key    = trimprefix(trimsuffix(data.azurerm_key_vault_secret.report_user_public_key_fetch.value, "-----END PUBLIC KEY-----"), "-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----")
  default_role      = snowflake_account_role.report_role.fully_qualified_name
  depends_on = [
    data.azurerm_key_vault_secret.report_user_public_key_fetch,
    snowflake_account_role.report_role
  ]
}

[edgarrmondragon]

You're right that the PEM body contains the base64-encoded key data, but a key in that format:

-----BEGIN LABEL-----
BASE64_ENCODED_DATA
-----END LABEL-----

are a multi-line string that is ugly to work with in YAML, and from #335:

A one liner base64 key looks much cleaner.

---

It might make sense to remove the deprecation warning and preserve support for raw keys indefinitely, since there's no functional reason to remove them. PRs welcome for that 🙂