Creating a password protected SSH keyĬreating an SSH key pair with a long pass-phrase is just the same process as that without, except you obviously specify the long password. Enter the password for your keychain in this prompt, it should be the same as your computer login password (unless you specifically changed it). When you first connect to github using your newly added key you will be prompted with a dialog box to add the password for your SSH key to your keychain.

When using a password protected SSH key with Mac OSX and Linux you can add your SSH key password to the keychain (keyring in Linux, but its the same thing) of your login account. Of course not, that would be a real pain. I don’t want to keep typing my long password on every commit? Imagine the pass-phrase as a kind of long password, which you will add to something called a keychain on your laptop so you only have to enter this long password once. Specifically you are protecting your private key as you distribute your public key (which is why its called public). To make using SSH a great experience to use and yet keeping it secure as possible requires you to set up an public / private key combination that is protected by a long pass-phrase. Ideally you should create a public/private key using a long passphrase, so that is what I will cover here. By creating a public/private key it also means you dont have to enter a username & password each time you use the service.

Secure Shell (SSH) is an invaluable tool to help developers manage code and data over different computers and services, eg.

Setup ssh for mac