SSH with TortoiseGit and Bitbucket or GitHub on Windows 10

Memo to self

It's always complicated to remember the steps necessary to get SSH working, and there are some idiosyncrasies as well. This guide may help you, I'm sure it'll help me the next time I need to do this myself.

Password-based login with HTTPS is starting to be obsolete, and it's less secure. Also with the nice SSH agent in Windows 10, you only need to enter the password once - ever.

Generate a key pair

Open a command prompt and run the ssh-keygen command, to generate a private and a public key file. Accept the defaults.

Enter a strong password for the private key file when asked, and ensure that you store it securely in your password manager.

This should create files in %USERPROFILE%\.ssh named id_rsa (the private key file) and id_rsa.pub (the public key file).

Enable and start the OpenSSH Authentication Agent Service

Nowadays it is shipped with Windows 10, but it's not enabled by default. So start your Services gadget and ensure the service is set to startup automatically, and it's running.

Add the private key to the SSH Authentication Agent

In the command prompt, type ssh-add . It should select the default ssh key id_rsa, and ask for the password you entered previously.

(If you get the error message "Can't add keys to ssh-agent, communication with agent failed", there seems to be an issue with certain Windows distributions. For whatever reasons, the following workaround appears to work. Open a new command prompt but elevated with Run As Administrator. Then type:

    sc.exe create sshd binPath=C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe .

Then exit the elevated command prompt and try again to do the ssh-add in your normal command prompt.)

Save the public key to Bitbucket...

Open the file %USERPROFILE%\.ssh\ids_rsa.pub in Notepad, Select All (Ctrl-A) and Copy (Ctrl-C). Paste it into this dialog in Bitbucket, Your Profile and Settings -> Personal Settings -> SSH keys -> Add key:

The Label is just anything that makes it easy for you to remember what key it is. Perhaps todays date, and the name of the computer you have the private key on can be a good start. Or just "My public SSH key" works too.

...and/or save the public key to GitHub

Go to Settings -> SSH keys -> New SSH key

The Title has the same meaning as Label for Bitbucket, see above.

Remove any Credential Helpers

Git credential helpers may conflict with the use of SSH keys, and there is no need for them anyway, so remove them from TortoiseGit in the Settings -> Git -> Credential menu so it looks like this:

Tell Git where to find SSH

Set the environment variable GIT_SSH to C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe . Right-click "This PC" -> Properties -> Advanced system settings -> Environment Variables... -> New...

Restart explorer (Task Manager -> Details -> explorer.exe right-click -> End Task, then File -> Run new Task -> Open: explorer -> OK) , or logout and login, or restart your computer.

Update origin URL to use SSH

Finally, update your repos origin to use SSH instead of HTTPS. The easiest way is to copy the part after 'git clone' in the Bitbucket "Clone" feature.

Click the "Clone" button, Select SSH and then the URL part of the git clone command suggested, and paste it in TortoiseGit Remote origin for the repo:

Done! Now you can enjoy password-less use of git with Bitbucket and/or GitHub.