I originally created this as a Gist on GitHub to be shared with some co-workers who were struggling to set up SSH on Windows. It seems to have been helpful to a lot of others as well; so, I'm posting it here so that it can benefit even more people.
Preparation
- Create a folder at the root of your user home folder
(Example:
C:/Users/uname/
) called.ssh
. - Create the following files if they do not already
exist (paths begin from the root of your user home
folder):
.ssh/config
.bash_profile
.bashrc
Create a New SSH Key
Follow the steps in the section named "Generating a new SSH Key" found in the following documentation from GitHub:
Generating a new SSH key and adding it to the ssh-agent
Configure SSH for Git Hosting Server
Add the following text to .ssh/config
(.ssh
should be found in the root of your user home folder):
Host github.com
Hostname github.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
Enable SSH Agent Startup Whenever Git Bash is Started
First, ensure that following lines are added to .bash_profile
, which should be found in your root user home folder:
test -f ~/.profile && . ~/.profile
test -f ~/.bashrc && . ~/.bashrc
Now, add the following text to .bashrc
, which should be found in your root user home folder:
# Start SSH Agent
#----------------------------
SSH_ENV="$HOME/.ssh/environment"
function run_ssh_env {
. "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
}
function start_ssh_agent {
echo "Initializing new SSH agent..."
ssh-agent | sed 's/^echo/#echo/' > "${SSH_ENV}"
echo "succeeded"
chmod 600 "${SSH_ENV}"
run_ssh_env;
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa;
}
if [ -f "${SSH_ENV}" ]; then
run_ssh_env;
ps -ef | grep ${SSH_AGENT_PID} | grep ssh-agent$ > /dev/null || {
start_ssh_agent;
}
else
start_ssh_agent;
fi
You're Done!
Please, feel free to ask any questions that you may have in the comments, I’m more than happy to help.
Top comments (4)
Thank you very much, this worked great!
Hi,
Is the final step still required? I'm running Git for Windows and SSH seems to work fine without setting the agent to start. Unless I set it in the past and have forgotten...
If it's working then you should be good. It's been quite a while since I've actually used windows for anything and given their efforts to integrate Linux features into the OS, it is possible that it is no longer necessary.
Thank you!