How do I remove the passphrase for the SSH key without having to create a new key

Question

I set a passphrase when creating a new SSH key on my laptop  But  as I realise now  this is quite painful when you are trying to commit  Git and SVN  to a remote location over SSH many times in an hour   One way I can think of is  delete my SSH keys and create new  Is there a way to remove the passphrase  while still keeping the same keys

User · Answer

You might want to add the following to your .bash_profile (or equivalent), which starts ssh-agent on login.

if [ -f ~/.agent.env ] ; then
    . ~/.agent.env > /dev/null
    if ! kill -0 $SSH_AGENT_PID > /dev/null 2>&1; then
        echo "Stale agent file found. Spawning new agent… "
        eval `ssh-agent | tee ~/.agent.env`
        ssh-add
    fi 
else
    echo "Starting ssh-agent"
    eval `ssh-agent | tee ~/.agent.env`
    ssh-add
fi

On some Linux distros (Ubuntu, Debian) you can use:

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub username@host

This will copy the generated id to a remote machine and add it to the remote keychain.

You can read more here and here.

User · Answer

In windows for me it kept saying  quot id ed25135  No such file or directory quot  upon entering above commands  So I went to the folder  copied the path within folder explorer and added  quot  id ed25135 quot  at the end  This is what I ended up typing and worked  ssh-keygen -p -f C  Users john  ssh id ed25135 This worked  Because for some reason  in Cmder the default path was something like this C  Users capit  ssh id ed25135  some were backslashes   quot   quot  and some were forward slashes   quot   quot

User · Answer

ssh-keygen -p worked for me   Opened git bash  Pasted     ssh-keygen -p  Hit enter for default location   Enter old passphrase   Enter new passphrase - BLANK  Confirm new passphrase - BLANK  BOOM the pain of entering passphrase for git push was gone   Thanks

User · Answer

On windows  you can use PuttyGen to load the private key file  remove the passphrase and then overwrite the existing private key file

User · Answer

Short answer     ssh-keygen -p   This will then prompt you to enter the keyfile location  the old passphrase  and the new passphrase  which can be left blank to have no passphrase      If you would like to do it all on one line without prompts do     ssh-keygen -p  -P old passphrase   -N new passphrase   -f keyfile    Important  Beware that when executing commands they will typically be logged in your    bash history file  or similar  in plain text including all arguments provided  i e  the passphrases in this case   It is  therefore  is recommended that you use the first option unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise      Notice though that you can still use -f keyfile without having to specify -P nor -N  and that the keyfile defaults to    ssh id rsa  so in many cases  it s not even needed   You might want to consider using ssh-agent  which can cache the passphrase for a time  The latest versions of gpg-agent also support the protocol that is used by ssh-agent

User · Answer

To change or remove the passphrase  I often find it simplest to pass in only the p and f flags  then let the system prompt me to supply the passphrases   ssh-keygen -p -f  lt name-of-private-key gt   For instance   ssh-keygen -p -f id rsa  Enter an empty password if you want to remove the passphrase   A sample run to remove or change a password looks something like this   ssh-keygen -p -f id rsa Enter old passphrase   Key has comment  bcuser pl1909  Enter new passphrase  empty for no passphrase    Enter same passphrase again   Your identification has been saved with the new passphrase    When adding a passphrase to a key that has no passphrase  the run looks something like this   ssh-keygen -p -f id rsa Key has comment  charlie elf-path  Enter new passphrase  empty for no passphrase    Enter same passphrase again   Your identification has been saved with the new passphrase

User · Answer

On the Mac you can store the passphrase for your private ssh key in your Keychain  which makes the use of it transparent  If you re logged in  it is available  when you are logged out your root user cannot use it  Removing the passphrase is a bad idea because  anyone with the file can use it   ssh-keygen -K   Add this to    ssh config  UseKeychain yes

[unix] How do I remove the passphrase for the SSH key without having to create a new key?

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