Adding a new SSH key to your GitHub account

To configure your account on GitHub.com to use your new (or existing) SSH key, you'll also need to add the key to your account.

Platform navigation

Tool navigation

In this article

About addition of SSH keys to your account

You can access and write data in repositories on GitHub using SSH (Secure Shell Protocol). When you connect via SSH, you authenticate using a private key file on your local machine. For more information, see About SSH.

You can also use SSH to sign commits and tags. For more information about commit signing, see About commit signature verification.

After you generate an SSH key pair, you must add the public key to GitHub.com to enable SSH access for your account.

Prerequisites

Before adding a new SSH key to your account on GitHub.com, complete the following steps.

  1. Check for existing SSH keys. For more information, see Checking for existing SSH keys.
  2. Generate a new SSH key and add it to your machine's SSH agent. For more information, see Generating a new SSH key and adding it to the ssh-agent.

Adding a new SSH key to your account

You can add an SSH key and use it for authentication, or commit signing, or both. If you want to use the same SSH key for both authentication and signing, you need to upload it twice.

After adding a new SSH authentication key to your account on GitHub.com, you can reconfigure any local repositories to use SSH. For more information, see Managing remote repositories.

Note

GitHub improved security by dropping older, insecure key types on March 15, 2022.

As of that date, DSA keys (ssh-dss) are no longer supported. You cannot add new DSA keys to your personal account on GitHub.

RSA keys (ssh-rsa) with a valid_after before November 2, 2021 may continue to use any signature algorithm. RSA keys generated after that date must use a SHA-2 signature algorithm. Some older clients may need to be upgraded in order to use SHA-2 signatures.

  1. Copy the SSH public key to your clipboard.

    If your SSH public key file has a different name than the example code, modify the filename to match your current setup. When copying your key, don't add any newlines or whitespace.

    $ pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
# Copies the contents of the id_ed25519.pub file to your clipboard

    Tip

    If pbcopy isn't working, you can locate the hidden .ssh folder, open the file in your favorite text editor, and copy it to your clipboard.

    $ clip < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
# Copies the contents of the id_ed25519.pub file to your clipboard

    Note

    • With Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), you can use clip.exe. Otherwise if clip isn't working, you can locate the hidden .ssh folder, open the file in your favorite text editor, and copy it to your clipboard.
    • On newer versions of Windows that use the Windows Terminal, or anywhere else that uses the PowerShell command line, you may receive a ParseError stating that The '&lt;' operator is reserved for future use. In this case, the following alternative clip command should be used:
    $ cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub | clip
# Copies the contents of the id_ed25519.pub file to your clipboard

    $ cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
# Then select and copy the contents of the id_ed25519.pub file
# displayed in the terminal to your clipboard

    Tip

    Alternatively, you can locate the hidden .ssh folder, open the file in your favorite text editor, and copy it to your clipboard.

  2. In the upper-right corner of any page on GitHub, click your profile photo, then click Settings.

  3. In the "Access" section of the sidebar, click SSH and GPG keys.

  4. Click New SSH key or Add SSH key.

  5. In the "Title" field, add a descriptive label for the new key. For example, if you're using a personal laptop, you might call this key "Personal laptop".

  6. Select the type of key, either authentication or signing. For more information about commit signing, see About commit signature verification.

  7. In the "Key" field, paste your public key.

  8. Click Add SSH key.

  9. If prompted, confirm access to your account on GitHub. For more information, see Sudo mode.

Note

To learn more about GitHub CLI, see About GitHub CLI.

Before you can use the GitHub CLI to add an SSH key to your account, you must authenticate to the GitHub CLI. For more information, see gh auth login in the GitHub CLI documentation.

To add an SSH key to your GitHub account, use the ssh-key add subcommand, specifying your public key. For authentication keys, if you're prompted to request additional scopes, follow the instructions in the command line.

gh ssh-key add KEY-FILE --type {authentication|signing}

To include a title for the new key, use the -t or --title flag.

gh ssh-key add KEY-FILE --title "personal laptop"

If you generated your SSH key by following the instructions in Generating a new SSH key and adding it to the ssh-agent, you can add the key to your account with this command.

gh ssh-key add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub --type signing

Did you successfully add an SSH key to your account?

Yes No

Further reading