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Scott Spence

Set up SSH for use with Git

4 min read
Hey! Thanks for stopping by! Just a word of warning, this post is almost 2 years old, . If there's technical information in here it's more than likely out of date.

Secure Shell (SSH) is a secure way to connect with code repository hosts like GitLab, Bitbucket and of course GitHub. While HTTPS connections require a username and password credentials, SSH instead uses a pair of cryptographically generated keys.

The two keys are public and private, the public key is the one that can be stored on the code repository/hosting provider (GitHub, GitLab, and the like) and the private one stays secure on my machine.

Get SSH set up on my machine and add a key to GitHub

I’ll first check that there are no rsa files here before continuing, use with the following bash command:

ls -al ~/.ssh

If there’s nothing there then I generate a new keygen with:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C [email protected] # add your email address 👍

The options here, -t is the type rsa, -b is for the bits being used in this case 4096 and -C is a comment to tie my email address to the key.

I’ll then be prompted to give a passphrase for the key, in this case I’ll leave it blank, fi you’re following along and want to add a passphrase then check out the SSH keys with passwords section.

I’ll add the SSH key to the SSH agent with:

# for mac and Linux from bash, also from Windows Git Bash
eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
# for Git Bash on Windows
eval `ssh-agent -s`
# fir Fish shell
eval (ssh-agent -c)

Then add the RSA key to SSH with:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Copy my key to clipboard with one of the following:

clip < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub # Windows
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub # Linux
pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_github.pub # Mac

I’m using Linux so I’ll cat out the key and copy that then add the SSH key to my GitHub profile from the settings page by clicking the New SSH key button and paste in my key. Save it…

If I already have projects on my machine that use HTTPS for authentication?

Say I already have projects on my machine and I have decided to use SSH in place of HTTPS connections with Git there there’s a few things I’ll need to do to my existing projects that use HTTPS for authentication.

On the GitHub repository for the project I’ll pick the Clone with SSH option from the Clone or download section on the page.

Once I have taken the link from there I’ll need to set the repo remote to the SSH URL.

I can use the Git remote verbose command (git remote -v) it will list the origin, something like this:

git remote -v
origin  https://github.com/username/repo-name-here.git (fetch)
origin  https://github.com/username/repo-name-here.git (push)
# if the repo is a fork it will show (remote) too

I can now set the new origin URL with this command:

git remote set-url origin [email protected]:username/repo-name-here.git

Where username is the username of the repo owner and repo-name-here is the name of that user’s repository.

How to authenticate with GitHub using SSH

Once the public key has been added to GitHub I can authenticate with:

ssh -T [email protected]

That’s it! I can now start using SSH and not have to authenticate each time I want to push a commit to GitHub!

SSH keys with passwords

If you add a password to your SSH key you will find yourself entering the password to authenticate on each [pull, push] operation. This can get tedious, especially if you have a long password in your keys.

Add the following line to your ~/.ssh/config/ file:

AddKeysToAgent yes

Open or create the ~/.ssh/config file with:

nano ~/.ssh/config

The SSH agent will also need to be started on each terminal session now to store the keys in, add the following to your ~/.bashrc file:

[ -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ] && eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"

Open the ~/.bashrc file with:

nano ~/.bashrc

Now the SSH agent will start on each terminal session and you will only be prompted for the password on the first pull,push operation.

Permissions issues?

There may be some permissions issues, I have generally found that setting the following permissions to the files and folders usually helps:

# change to the .ssh/ folder
.ssh/
# set permission
sudo chmod 600 id_rsa
# change out to set the folder permissions
../
sudo chmod 700 .ssh/
# authenticate with GitHub
ssh -T [email protected]

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