About addition of SSH keys to your account
You can access and write data in repositories on GitHub AE 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."
After you generate an SSH key pair, you must add the public key to GitHub AE to enable SSH access for your account.
Prerequisites
Before adding a new SSH key to your account on GitHub AE, complete the following steps.
- Check for existing SSH keys. For more information, see "Checking for existing SSH keys."
- 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 AE, you can reconfigure any local repositories to use SSH. For more information, see "Managing remote repositories."
-
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_rsa.pub # Copies the contents of the id_rsa.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_rsa.pub # Copies the contents of the id_rsa.pub file to your clipboard
Notes:
- With Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), you can use
clip.exe
. Otherwise ifclip
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 thatThe '<' operator is reserved for future use.
In this case, the following alternativeclip
command should be used:
$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | clip # Copies the contents of the id_rsa.pub file to your clipboard
$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub # Then select and copy the contents of the id_rsa.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. - With Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), you can use
-
In the upper-right corner of any page, click your profile photo, then click Settings.
-
In the "Access" section of the sidebar, click SSH and GPG keys.
-
Click New SSH key or Add SSH key.
-
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".
-
In the "Key" field, paste your public key.
-
Click Add SSH key.
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 authentication key to your GitHub account, use the ssh-key add
subcommand, specifying your public key. If you're prompted to request additional scopes, follow the instructions in the command line.
gh ssh-key add KEY-FILE
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