Apple - How can I permanently add my SSH private key to Keychain so it is automatically available to ssh?
On OSX, the native ssh-add
client has a special argument to save the private key's passphrase in the OSX keychain, which means that your normal login will unlock it for use with ssh. On OSX Sierra and later, you also need to configure SSH to always use the keychain (see Step 2 below).
Alternatively you can use a key without a passphrase, but if you prefer the security that's certainly acceptable with this workflow.
Step 1 - Store the key in the keychain
Just do this once:
ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/[your-private-key]
Enter your key passphrase, and you won't be asked for it again.
(If you're on a pre-Sierra version of OSX, you're done, Step 2 is not required.)
Step 2 - Configure SSH to always use the keychain
It seems that OSX Sierra removed the convenient behavior of persisting your keys between logins, and the update to ssh no longer uses the keychain by default. Because of this, you will get prompted to enter the passphrase for a key after you upgrade, and again after each restart.
The solution is fairly simple, and is outlined in this github thread comment. Here's how you set it up:
Ensure you've completed Step 1 above to store the key in the keychain.
If you haven't already, create an
~/.ssh/config
file. In other words, in the.ssh
directory in your home dir, make a file calledconfig
.In that
.ssh/config
file, add the following lines:Host * UseKeychain yes AddKeysToAgent yes IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
Change
~/.ssh/id_rsa
to the actual filename of your private key. If you have other private keys in your~/.ssh
directory, also add anIdentityFile
line for each of them. For example, I have one additional line that readsIdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
for a 2nd private key.The
UseKeychain yes
is the key part, which tells SSH to look in your OSX keychain for the key passphrase.That's it! Next time you load any ssh connection, it will try the private keys you've specified, and it will look for their passphrase in the OSX keychain. No passphrase typing required.
I had a similar problem, in that I was being asked every time for my pub-key passphrase. Per suggestion of user "trisweb" above, I turned on these options to ~/.ssh/config
:
Host *
UseKeychain yes
AddKeysToAgent yes
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
But it still prompted every time I wanted to use ssh. Eventually I turned on ssh -v
and found this debug line:
debug1: key_load_private: incorrect passphrase supplied to decrypt private key
I then opened my keychain in "Keychain Access.app", found the key named "SSH: /Users/username/.ssh/id_rsa" and opened it up. I clicked "Show password" to disclose the password and indeed found that the passphrase in the keyring was an old passphrase. I updated the passphrase in Keychain Access, and now password-free works.
I could have also updated the passphrase with this phrase:
ssh-keygen -p -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa
To all where the above did not work, my issue appears to have been because I was duplicating the UseKeychain yes
& AddKeysToAgent yes
in all ssh key profiles / shortcuts. I updated my ~/.ssh/config
file to declare these only once and they now all load on login without prompting for passwords on startup, e.g:
Host *
UseKeychain yes
AddKeysToAgent yes
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/foo
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/bar
Host foo
HostName foo.com
User fooUser
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/foo
Host bar
HostName bar.com
User barUser
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/bar