To enable SSH Agent automatically on Windows, start PowerShell as an Administrator and run the following commands:
# Make sure you're running as an Administrator
Set-Service ssh-agent -StartupType Automatic
Start-Service ssh-agent
Get-Service ssh-agent
Run these commands in a terminal window within Visual Studio Code.
Show keys managed by the ssh-agent
For git, add a system environment variable or use a temporary setting in a PowerShell terminal of VSCode.
$env:GIT_SSH="C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe"
If you add the line $env:GIT_SSH="C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe" to your Powershell profile the environment
variable will always be used.
https://www.cgranade.com/blog/2016/06/06/ssh-keys-in-vscode.html
Using SSH Keys in Visual Studio Code on Windows
Visual Studio Code is
Microsoft’s open-source code editor for Windows, OS X and
Linux. Nicely, VS Code has built-in support for Git and support for Python
through an extension, making it a useful for
scientific development. Using VS Code on Windows is somewhat frustrated, however, if you want to work with a Git
repository that was cloned using SSH. Thankfully, I found a workable solution using PuTTY and Git for Windows, such that
VS Code transparently works with password-protected SSH keys. Below, I detailed how I got it working in as complete a
detail as reasonable, but you may have already done some or even many of these steps. If so, the procedure is actually
fairly simple, and consists of pointing Git (and hence VS Code) to use PuTTY and Pageant instead of the SSH version that
ships with Git for Windows.
First, though, a disclaimer. These steps worked on my Windows 10 installation, but may not work on yours. If you find
that this is the case, let me know, and I’ll try and update accordingly.
Before we get into things, we’ll need a bit of software. In particular, we’ll need:
Do not install PuTTY from its official homepage, as this will download PuTTY over an insecure
connection. This guide will cover how to download PuTTY securely.
For much of this, we can use the Chocolatey package manager for Windows to save some grief,
so
let’s start by installing that. If you already have Chocolatey, please skip this step. (If you aren’t sure, try
running choco from PowerShell.) Run PowerShell as administrator, then run the following command to download and
install
Chocolatey:
PS> Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope Process RemoteSigned
PS> iwr https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 -UseBasicParsing | iex
Once this is done, close and reopen PowerShell (again as administrator). This will make choco available as a command.
Now we can use it to install Git and OpenSSH (as above, we will not install PuTTY using Chocolatey, as it will
download
PuTTY from its official homepage using an insecure connection). Run the following PowerShell commands to install Git and
OpenSSH:
PS> choco install git
PS> choco install win32-openssh
We’ll finish up by downloading the version of PuTTY that ships with WinSCP, since that version is
delivered via HTTPS and not insecure HTTP. In particular,
use this link to download PuTTY, then run the installer once
you’ve downloaded it.
Once everything is installed, we now need to make sure that you have an SSH private key and that this key is registered
with your Git hosting service (for instance, GitHub or Bitbucket). If you already have keys and have registered them
with your hosting provider, please skip on ahead.
In any case, to generate keys, we’ll again use PowerShell:
Simply follow the prompts to make yourself a new public/private key pair, making sure to choose a long (~40 character)
passphrase. This passphrase provides much of the entropy for your key, such that it should be much longer than a typical
password. Never type your passphrase into a remote password prompt— the passphrase is used to unlock your key
locally
on your machine, and should never be sent over the network. If a website asks you for your SSH passphrase, you are
probably being scammed.
By default, the new keys will be located in C:\Users\<username>\.ssh\id_rsaandC:\Users\<username>\.ssh\id_rsa.pub.
As
the names suggest, the first of these is theprivatekey and should not be shared with anyone. The other is the public
key, and serves to identify yourself to others. Follow the instructions
for GitHub
or Bitbucket (for Bitbucket,
make sure to follow the Linux and OS X instructions, even from Windows) to upload yourpublickey to your hosting
provider.
Next, we’ll make sure that your private key is setup in an SSH agent. This will securely remember your passphrase within
a given session, so that you don’t have to type it in every time you use it. In particular, we’ll configure Pageant,
since this is installed with PuTTY, and works well with a variety of command-line and GUI tools for Windows— most
notably, with VS Code.
Pageant must be run at startup in order to be useful, so we’ll begin by adding it to the startup folder now. In Windows
Explorer (Windows 8.1 and earlier) or in File Explorer (Windows 10 and later), go to the
folder C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup. Right-click inside this
folder and select New → Shortcut. From there, browse to C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY and select pageant.exe.
Next, we need to import your new key into PuTTY/Pageant.
- Run PuTTYgen from the Start Menu and select
File → Load Key.... - From there, navigate to
C:\Users\<username>\.ssh\ and select id_rsa (the private key). You may have to drop down
the
file types selector in the dialog box to see this, as PuTTYgen defaults to filtering out everything but files ending
in *.ppk. Once selected, you’ll be prompted by PuTTY to unlock your key by typing in your passphrase. Do so, and
PuTTYgen will show the corresponding public key. - Select
File → Save private key to export your private key in PuTTY, rather than OpenSSH, format. I suggest saving
it
as id_rsa.ppk in the same folder as id_rsa, but this is up to you. Just be sure that to save it in a folder that
only you can read, and that is not synchronized using Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive or similar.
Finally, run Pageant from the Start Menu (in the future, this will be handled automatically by the shortcut we created
above). This will add a new icon to your system tray. It may be hidden by the arrow; if so, click the arrow to make all
fo the system tray icons visible. Right-click on Pageant and select Add Key. Browse to where you saved id_rsa.ppk
and
select it. You’ll be prompted to unlock your key. Upon doing so, your unlocked key will then be made available in
Pageant until you log out or quit Pageant.
Despite the name, this is a short step. Whenever you log into an SSH server, PuTTY will check that the server’s
fingerprint is correct. This is a short cryptographic string identifying that server, such that checking the
fingerprint
helps against man-in-the-middle attacks. If you haven’t logged into a server with PuTTY before, however, it has no idea
how to check the fingerprint, and will fail to login. Since VS Code ignores these errors, Git support will silently fail
unless you first attempt to log into the SSH server offered by your Git host. To do so, we’ll use PowerShell one last
time. Run one of the following commands below, depending on which hosting provider you use.
In either case, you’ll be prompted to add the server’s fingerprint to the registry. If you are confident that your
traffic is not being intercepted, selectyat this prompt. Neither GitHub nor Bitbucket actually allows logins via SSH,
so you’ll get an error, but this is OK: you’ve gotten far enough to see the server’s fingerprint, and that’s all we
needed. To check, you can run the commands above again, and note that you are no longer prompted to add the fingerprint,
but instead fail immediately.
We’re almost done. All that’s left is to point Git for Windows at PuTTY and Pageant, rather than its own built-in SSH
client. Since VS Code uses Git for Windows, this will ensure that VS Code does what we want.
- Right-click on
My Computer or This PC in Windows/File Explorer, and select Properties. - From there, click
Advanced system settings in the sidebar to the left. On the Advanced tab, press
the Environment Variables... button at the bottom. - Finally, click
New... on the user variables pane (top), and add a new variable named GIT_SSH with
value C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\plink.exe. - You may want to use
Browse File... in this dialog box to make sure you get the path correct. - Once done, press
OK to add the variable,OK again to close the Environment Variables dialog, then OK a third
time to
close System Properties. - Finally, close the System window.
