Github SSH Key set up
This tutorial will help you to be able to set up SSH key connection to your github account on a Linux machine. You can also continue to read this tutorial if you want to set up Deploy Keys.
For now let’s just assume that you’ve successfully set up SSH key, after that you need to make sure that you don’t access your repo with HTTPS, but with ssh, so if you previously cloned your repo wirh https set it to ssh as below:
git remote set-url origin git@github.com:yourUsername/nameOfRepo.git
Now let’s come back to SSH generation part…
Navigate to ~/.ssh directory
Execute:
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "yourGithubEmail"
If you press enter:
By default id_rsa named public and private keys will be generated.
You can also specify it
Then will be prompted to enter passphrase
You can again press enter and skip it (you won’t have passphrase in this case), or you can set up passphrase by specifying
Now keys should be generated.
(execute ls to see them)
- Copy content of public key (generated file with .pub extension)
- Go to ssh key section of github in the settings
- Click on new ssh key
- Give a title
- In the publick key box, paste what you’ve copied.
- Save it.
Now come back to terminal, in the .ssh directory, create config file
You can create by either:
touch config
Or
vi config
Paste this into config file
Host github.com
User git
Port 22
Hostname github.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/nameOfYourPrivateKey
TCPKeepAlive yes
IdentiesOnly yes # if it throws error about this line delete or comment out
Here make sure that you changed IdentityFile’s path with the path that points to your own private key
Save the file and exit
Execute following commands:
eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
ssh-add ~/.ssh/nameOfYourPrivateKey
You should be good to go now :)
Test your ssh connection by:
ssh -T github.com
It should say you have successfully set up SSH key authentication if you have done so :)
Thanks for reading!