You should then see a confirmation that the key was generated.If you are creating a key for the first time, click on the Generate Key button.You can choose to make it 4096, if you wish. Leave the key type at RSA and key size at 2048. Make sure to write down the password you used or save a copy in a secure location. Type in a password (do NOT use the password generator), then confirm it.You will never need to run ssh-add nor enter your passphrase again. When prompted for your passphrase enter it and that is it. To store the passphrase for your default key in the Keychain open a Terminal and run:Īnd to store the passphrase for a different key run:

(Yes, you really need to reboot, there is no way around it!)įrom now on, whenever you cause something needing the SSH agent to run, the SSH agent will automatically be launched if it is not running already.

To enable SSH agent starting automatically on demand (this happens by integrating SSH agent with launchd) you need to open a terminal and run: If you're on anything newer, you no longer need to do this, so feel free to skip this step and go straight onto Storing Passphrases in the Keychain below. This is important only if you're on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.1 or below. This means that if the user chooses to store their pass phrase(s) in the Keychain they never need to enter their pass phrase again once they have added it to their Keychain. Going even further, Mac OS X Leopard modifies the SSH tools to support storing the pass phrases in the user's Keychain. Mac OS X Leopard modifies SSH agent so that it is started via the Mac OS X launchd service on demand (i.e. SSH agent allows a user to enter their passphrase(s) for unlocking various SSH keys once at the start of a session to unlock the keys and from then on for the duration of the session the user no longer has to enter the pass phrase(s).Ĭonventionally setting up SSH agent for use is a bit of a pain as it has to be run before the user session is started.

Ssh for mac os x