Using git with ssh-agent on Windows

Preface

Previous articles have already solved the SSH login issue on Windows, successfully getting the Windows ssh-agent working. For details, you can refer to this article: Implementing Passwordless SSH Login on Windows 10

However, using Git still repeatedly prompts for the private key passphrase, which is quite annoying.

The reason is also simple—you can find out by opening Git Bash and running a test command:

$ ssh-add -l
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.

It turns out that Git uses its own SSH, not the one from the Windows system. This is likely for compatibility reasons, considering Windows previously didn’t have SSH.

The solution is straightforward: simply configure Git to use Windows' SSH.

Configuration

One line of code does it all

git config --global core.sshCommand "'C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe'"

Got a problem?

At first, after I finished configuring it, it kept throwing errors when I ran it.

CreateProcessW failed error:2
posix_spawnp: No such file or directory

Only after adding the -v parameter did I realize it was due to a setting in my ~/.ssh/config.

Previously, I had configured GitHub to use a proxy.

Host github.com
    User git
    Port 443
    HostName ssh.github.com
    TCPKeepAlive yes
    ProxyCommand "$HOME/scoop/apps/git/current/mingw64/bin/connect.exe -S 127.0.0.1:7890 -a none %h %p"

It worked fine before when using Git's built-in SSH environment, but after switching to Windows's native SSH, it stopped working. So I commented out that ProxyCommand configuration, and everything was fine.

If anyone else encounters a similar problem, you can refer to this.

References

• How to use SSH with Git and ssh-agent on Windows
• windows 10 ssh proxycommand: "posix_spawn: No such file or directory"