Switching to SSH keys for github
This article covers some aspects of using SSH keys with github that are left out of the original documentation on github.
It assumes that you’ve been using HTTPS with a password for remote access to github.
Note
In this article, text between angle brackets (like <user>) are
used as placeholders for actual strings that you have to provide.
Mostly follow the documentation
There is documentation on github how to generate an SSH key for use with github. It is mostly ok to follow this, but it lacks some final pieces.
Note
Keep in mind to select Linux at the top of this documentation.
Otherwise you will not see all commands!
In contrast to what is mentioned there, I would suggest generating a separate
key only for github, using the -f argument of ssh-keygen.
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C <user>@<provider.tld> -f /home/<user>/.ssh/id_github
Starting the ssh-agent and adding the key to the agent is covered in the
aforementioned documentation.
As is uploading the public key to github.
There are two missing pieces:
- Configuring SSH
- Converting your repositories
Configure SSH
What is missing is how to set up SSH.
For this you will have to edit your ~/.ssh-config.
You will need to add the following lines to it:
Host github.com
KexAlgorithms curve25519-sha256@libssh.org,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1,diffie-hellman-group14-sha1
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_github
Updating your repositories
For every repository that has a remote on github, you have to change the URL.
The original will be https://github.com/<github-user>/<Project>.git.
This will need to be changed to git@github.com:<github-user>/<Project>.git
You can find the remotes in your repositories by running the following command from your home-directory.
find . -type f -path '*.git/config' | xargs grep -B 1 -H 'url.*<github-user>/' {} \; | less
Now you will have to change directory to every repository and issue the
following command, where <github-user> should be replaced by your github user
name and <project> should be replaced by the project name.
git remote set-url origin git@github.com:<github-user>/<project>.git
After you have done this, you will be asked for your SSH key passphrase when
running git push.
For comments, please send me an e-mail.