SSH Key - Still asking for password and passphrase

Question

I ve been somewhat  putting up  with Github always asking for my username and password when I clone a repository   I want to bypass this step because it is an annoyance within my workflow    I tried setting up an SSH key  which I successfully did  using this guide  https   help github com articles generating-ssh-keys and I was successful     My problem is that I am still asked for my github password and passphrase when cloning a repository  using SSH    My understanding was that after I set up this SSH key  I would no longer have to do that   I am a little unsure what to ask  so I will just state my goal        I want to be able to clone repositories without having to put in my Github information all the time    What am I missing with my SSH key  If anyone can provide some guidance or resources I would appreciate it  because I ve always felt a little lost when it came to SSH authentication in GitHub   From my knowledge  this is a command that tests if things are working properly  here are the output from my console       ssh -T git github com Saving password to keychain failed Enter passphrase for key   Users MYNAME  ssh id rsa   Hi MYNAME  You ve successfully authenticated  but GitHub does not provide shell access    When I input my password  should that fail first  Then  when I enter my passphrase  it passes

User · Answer

If on Windows and using PuTTY as the SSH key generator, this quick & easy solution turned out to be the only working solution for me using a plain windows command line:

Your PuTTY installation should come with several executable, among others, pageant.exe and plink.exe
When generating a SSH key with PuttyGen, the key is stored with the .ppk extension
Run "full\path\to\your\pageant.exe" "full\path\to\your\key.ppk" (must be quoted). This will execute the pageant service and register your key (after entering the password).
Set environment variable GIT_SSH=full\path\to\plink.exe (must not be quoted). This will redirect git ssh-communication-related commands to plink that will use the pageantservice for authentication without asking for the password again.

Done!

Note1: This documentation warns about some peculiarities when working with the GIT_SHH environment variable settings. I can push, pull, fetch with any number of additional parameters to the command and everything works just fine for me (without any need to write an extra script as suggested therein).

Note2: Path to PuTTY instalation is usually in PATH so may be omitted. Anyway, I prefer specifying the full paths.

Automation:

The following batch file can be run before using git from command line. It illustrates the usage of the settings:

git-init.bat
   @ECHO OFF
   :: Use start since the call is blocking
   START "%ProgramFiles%\PuTTY\pageant.exe" "%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\.ssh\id_ed00000.ppk"
   SET GIT_SSH=%ProgramFiles%\PuTTY\plink.exe

Anyway, I have the GIT_SSH variable set in SystemPropertiesAdvanced.exe > Environment variables and the pageant.exe added as the Run registry key (*).

(*) Steps to add a Run registry key>

run regedit.exe
Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Run
Do (menu) Edit > New > String Value
Enter an arbitrary (but unique) name
Do (menu) Edit > Modify... (or double-click)
Enter the quotes-enclosed path to pageant.exe and public key, e.g., "C:\Program Files\PuTTY\pageant.exe" "C:\Users\username\.ssh\id_ed00000.ppk" (notice that %ProgramFiles% etc. variables do not work in here unless choosing Expandable string value in place of the String value in step 3.).

User · Answer

I think  sudo bangbang s answer should be accept   When generate ssh key  you just hit  Enter  to skip typing your passoword when it prompt you to config password    That means you DO NOT NEED a password when use ssh key  so remember when generate ssh key  DO NOT enter password  just hit  Enter  to skip it

User · Answer

If you work with HTTPs urls  it ll always ask for your username   password   If you re correctly using SSH when cloning   setting remotes  Then make sure you have a ssh-agent to remember your password  That way  you ll only enter your passphrase once by terminal session   If it is still too annoying  then simply set a ssh-key without passphrase

User · Answer

Add Identity without Keychain  There may be times in which you don t want the passphrase stored in the keychain  but don t want to have to enter the passphrase over and over again   You can do that like this   ssh-add    ssh id rsa    This will ask you for the passphrase  enter it and it will not ask again until you restart   Add Identity Using Keychain  As  dennis points out in the comments  to persist the passphrase through restarts by storing it in your keychain  you can use the -K option  -k for Ubuntu  when adding the identity like this   ssh-add -K    ssh id rsa   Once again  this will ask you for the passphrase  enter it and this time it will never ask again for this identity

User · Answer

If you are using ssh url for git  when prompted for password for ssh put the username as  git  and the password as your system s login password

User · Answer

If you re using windows  this worked for me   eval  ssh-agent -s  ssh-add    ssh   rsa   It ll ask for passphrase in the second command  and that s it

User · Answer

Generally  here are the steps to allow you make a remote connection to your server using ssh without password    Create a pair of rsa private and public key    ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C  your comments   Copy your public key and login to your remote server Add your public key to  ssh authorized keys If you have multiple ssh keys in your computer you might to add your key using ssh-add    ssh-add  path to private key Then try ssh to your server    ssh username your ip address   Source  http   diary-of-programmer blogspot com 2018 08 tips-how-to-ssh-to-your-digitalocean html

User · Answer

Adding to the above answers  Had to do one more step on Windows for git to be able to use ssh-agent  Had to run the following command in powershell to update the environment variable  PS gt   Environment   SetEnvironmentVariable  quot GIT SSH quot    quot    Get-Command ssh  Source  quot    System EnvironmentVariableTarget   User  Restart VSCode  Powershell or whatever terminal you are using to activate the env variable  Complete instructions can be found  here   https   snowdrift tech cli ssh git tutorials 2019 01 31 using-ssh-agent-git-windows html

User · Answer

I already had set a passphrase but for some reason it wouldn t recognize it anymore  So I just added the identity file to my keychain again using ssh-add -K and it stopped asking for my password

User · Answer

As explained in Cloning a Git repo from VSTS over SSH asks a password  Unexpected  The problem may be because of public key authentication failing  so it then asks for mycompany account s password    This would not happen if the public key authentication succeeded   So you might check id rsa pub and even create a new one

User · Answer

This answer is primarily for windows users and also equally relevant if you re having trouble cloning with tfs  github or gitlab on any other OS  The default authentication mode when using SSH is the private key  Whenever that fails for some reason  the ssh-agent falls back to username and password based authentication  There are several reasons why the default key based authentication might have failed  Following are the most common cases   a  The ssh-agent cannot find the default private key file which is id rsa  and no other key path is specified explicitly  b  The public key stored in the server is incorrect  c  The path you re trying to clone is incorrect  In any case  to troubleshoot the issue  first of all execute the git clone command with verbose logging with the command   GIT TRACE 1 GIT SSH COMMAND  quot ssh -vvv quot  git clone ssh   pathToYourRepo  You can go through each step in the log to get an intuition of what the issue might be   Troubleshooting in case of  a   Make sure you have the default key name id rsa in the  ssh directory  You might have specified some different keyname when generating the key with ssh-keygen command or maybe there isn t any key at all    In case you want to specify a different key for authentication  use the following command    ssh-agent bash -c  ssh-add    ssh anotherKey  git clone ssh   pathToYourRepo      Troubleshooting in case of  b   Make sure there aren t extra white spaces when storing the public key in the server    Troubleshooting in case of  c   Make sure you aren t trying to clone with the https version of the repository path

User · Answer

You can remove passphrase for the key    ssh-keygen -p  -P old passphrase   -N new passphrase   -f keyfile    or you can run    ssh-keygen -p   you get a prompt for keyfile  By default it    ssh id rsa so press enter  You ll be prompted for current pass phrase enter it   Then there will be a prompt for new pass phrase  press enter

User · Answer

Use ssh-add command to add your public key to the ssh-agent  ssh-add  Make sure the ssh public key e g     ssh id rsa pub is what you have in your repo settings  Make sure you can actually ssh into the server e g  For Bitbucket  ssh -T git bitbucket org  Update the url to move from https to ssh  You can check which you use by checking the output of  git remote -v  If you see a https    in the urls  then you are still using https  To update it  Take the url and just replace  https    with ssh    e g  Change  https   git bitbucket org        To  ssh   git bitbucket org        Referenced  https   docs github com en github using-git changing-a-remotes-url switching-remote-urls-from-https-to-ssh

User · Answer

Worked in LinuxMint Ubuntu  Do the following steps  Step 1      Goto file      ssh config   Save the below lines into the file  Host bitbucket org     HostName bitbucket org     User git     IdentityFile  home apple myssh-privatekey     AddKeysToAgent yes      Don t forget to add this line AddKeysToAgent yes    Step 2   Open the terminal and add the keyset to the ssh-add    ssh-add -k  home apple myssh-privatekey   provide the passphrase

User · Answer

TL DR  You need to use an ssh agent  So  open terminal  amp  before pushing to git  execute ssh-add  enter your passphrase when prompted   Check out the original StackExchange answer here

User · Answer

If you are using Windows and GIT without third party tools and your key is not secured by a password   passphrase use this    Environment Variable HOME must be set to your user profile  e g  C  Users Laptop  Go to C  Users Laptop  ssh  folder and edit  config  file   or create the file   Example  C  Users Laptop ssh config   note  there is no   at the end   Add your git-server host to the  config  file like so    Example host entry Host myhostname com     HostName myhostname com     User git     IdentityFile c  users laptop  ssh id rsa pub     PasswordAuthentication no     Port 422  Save the file and clone the repository like this   git clone ssh   myhostname com git-server repos picalc git   You can use additional configuration parameters for the  config  file host entry  These can be found in your local git installation folder  e g   C  Program Files Git etc ssh ssh config   Excerpt     Host       ForwardAgent no     ForwardX11 no     RhostsRSAAuthentication no     RSAAuthentication yes     PasswordAuthentication yes     HostbasedAuthentication no     GSSAPIAuthentication no     GSSAPIDelegateCredentials no     BatchMode no     CheckHostIP yes     AddressFamily any     ConnectTimeout 0     StrictHostKeyChecking ask     IdentityFile    ssh identity     IdentityFile    ssh id rsa     IdentityFile    ssh id dsa     IdentityFile    ssh id ecdsa     IdentityFile    ssh id ed25519     Port 22     Protocol 2     Cipher 3des     Ciphers aes128-ctr aes192-ctr aes256-ctr arcfour256 arcfour128 aes128-cbc 3des-cbc     MACs hmac-md5 hmac-sha1 umac-64 openssh com hmac-ripemd160     EscapeChar       Tunnel no     TunnelDevice any any     PermitLocalCommand no     VisualHostKey no     ProxyCommand ssh -q -W  h  p gateway example com     RekeyLimit 1G 1h

User · Answer

If you used for your GIT the password authentication before  but now are using SSH authentication  you need to switch remote URLs from HTTPS to SSH  git remote set-url origin git github com USERNAME REPOSITORY git

User · Answer

I tried all the answers here and none of these answers worked  My password would not persist between sessions restarts of my Mac     What I found out from reading this OpenRadar and this Twitter discussion was that Apple purposely changed the behaviour for ssh-agent in macOS 10 12 Sierra to no longer automatically load the previous SSH keys  In order to maintain the same behaviour as El Cap I did the following    ssh-add -K    ssh id rsa Note  change the path to where your id rsa key is located  ssh-add -A  Create  or edit if it exists  the following    ssh config file   Host     UseKeychain yes   AddKeysToAgent yes   IdentityFile    ssh id rsa    And now my password is remembered between restarts of my Mac

User · Answer

Mobaxterme had a UI interface for it  setting  gt  configuration  gt  SSH  gt  SSH Agent  gt   check  Use internal SSH agent  moboAgent   gt  add  your id rsa and restart mobaxterme to set changes

User · Answer

Try ssh-agent as it is explained there   https   help github com articles working-with-ssh-key-passphrases

User · Answer

Same problem to me and the solution was   See this github doc to convert remote s URL from https to ssh  To check if remote s URL is ssh or https  use git remote -v  To switch from https to ssh  git remote set-url origin git github com USERNAME REPOSITORY git  jeeYem

User · Answer

I recently upgraded to macOS Mojave  and installed some tools via homebrew  which seemed to swap Apple s version of ssh-add for the different one  My default version of ssh-add did not have the -K option  This led to the following error     ssh-add  illegal option -- K  You can see which version of ssh-add you have by running which ssh-add     Mine was stored in  usr local bin ssh-add   To fix this  I had to point the key to Apple s version    usr bin ssh-add -K    ssh id rsa   Git GitHub worked perfectly afterward  For more information  see  Error  ssh-add  illegal option -- K

User · Answer

I d like to add an answer for those who may still need to enter the password because they have set IdentitiesOnly as yes  This may cause by multiple keys and the identity file  being keys for git or server    After I have generated the key and copied it to the server   ssh-keygen ssh-copy-id -i    ssh 12gpu server pub lerner 192 168 20 160   I found it didn t work    Then I went to check the    ssh config file  I saw this at the bottom    Host   IdentitiesOnly yes   Then I add this above   Host 12gpu HostName 192 168 20 160 User lerner IdentityFile    ssh 12gpu server   I can just log in by entering ssh 12gpu   Then you can add multiple ssh keys using your favorite names  and you only need to add the settings like the above four lines to the config file    Host is the name you d like to enter when you connect to the server later  the HostName is the server s ip or domain like github com  User is the user name you log in the server like the user name or git for github or gitlab  and the IdentityFile is the file where you store the key you have generated

User · Answer

Problem seems to be because you re cloning from HTTPS and not SSH  I tried all the other solutions here but was still experiencing problems  This did it for me   Using the osxkeychain helper like so    Find out if you have it installed   git credential-osxkeychain If it s not installed  you ll be prompted to download it as part of Xcode Command Line Tools  If it is installed  tell Git to use osxkeychain helper using the global credential helper config   git config --global credential helper osxkeychain   The next time you clone an HTTPS url  you ll be prompted for the username password  and to grant access to the OSX keychain  After you do this the first time  it should be saved in your keychain and you won t have to type it in again

User · Answer

Just run the following command    ssh-add -K   It will never ask you to enter the password again

User · Answer

The way that worked for me  windows 10   open git-gui from applications help show ssh-keys generate ssh-key copy ssh key to git provider  This way we guarantee that git client is pointing to the valid ssh

User · Answer

I had to execute   eval  ssh-agent -s  ssh-add   Note  You will have to do this again after every restart  If you want to avoid it  then enter it in your   bashrc  file which is in C  Users  lt  lt USERNAME gt  gt   bashrc on windows  It is probably hidden  so make sure that you can see hidden files   Solution found here

User · Answer

Make sure you are using ssh for your repository also  mahtab mahtab-Lenovo-G50-70   my-projects jenkins-cje-2017  git remote -v origin  git github com eMahtab jenkins-cje-2017 git  fetch  origin  git github com eMahtab jenkins-cje-2017 git  push      Don t use https  if your remote is using https then it will keep asking for password  even If you have added the public key to Github and added private key to ssh-agent  Below will always ask for password  mahtab mahtab-Lenovo-G50-70   my-projects jenkins-cje-2017  git remote -v origin  https   github com eMahtab jenkins-cje-2017 git  fetch  origin  https   github com eMahtab jenkins-cje-2017 git  push

User · Answer

For Mac OSX Sierra  I found that the fixes suggested in the github issue for Open Radar fixed my problem   Seems like Sierra changed the default behavior  I started having this problem after upgrading    This one I found especially useful   https   github com lionheart openradar-mirror issues 15361 issuecomment-249059061  ssh-add -A    This resulted in my identity being added to the agent  after I ran   ssh-add -K   path to key    To summarize  in OSX 12    ssh-add -K   path to key  ssh-add -A    should result in    Identity added    path to file     path to file     EDIT   I noticed the next time I did a full reboot  aka the agent stopped and restarted  this no longer worked   The more complete solution is what  ChrisJF mentioned above  creating a    ssh config file   Here s the output of mine     cat    ssh config Host     UseKeychain yes   AddKeysToAgent yes   IdentityFile    ssh id rsa   You can add as many IdentityFile entries as you need  but this is the default setup   This is the  trending  answer on the openradar link above  ATM  as well

User · Answer

This is what worked for me   git config --global core sshCommand   C  Windows System32 OpenSSH ssh exe

User · Answer

Use ssh remote url provided by Github not https

User · Answer

On Mac OSX you can add your private key to the keychain using the command   ssh-add -K  path to private key   If your private key is stored at    ssh and is named id rsa   ssh-add -K    ssh id rsa   You will then be prompted for your password  which will be stored in your keychain   Edit - Handle restart  In order to not have to fill in your password even after a restart add the following to your ssh configuration file  commonly located at    ssh config   Host     UseKeychain yes   AddKeysToAgent yes   IdentityFile    ssh id rsa

[git] SSH Key - Still asking for password and passphrase

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