Using CI3 to push to a Github repo

I was able to get the above library to find the repo on my server but I cannot get push command to work due to permissions. I assume that because my web user is apache and my ssh in /.ssh on my server is owned by root, that this is the issue. How do I resolve this though? apache doesn't really have a home directly as it isn't a normal user, so i can't create an SSH key for it, can I?