Github private/public SSH key authentication

Question

I have github. I created a private/public pair. I put the public on github.

But I can never push to github. Every time, it says public denied. In order to push, I need to do this:

eval ssh-agent
ssh-add ~/.ssh/github_dsa

This is driving me nuts that I have to do this every time. So, I just put it in my ~/.bashrc file. I feel like that's a hack. Is this normal?

Answer 1

For a non-default-named SSH key? Sort of. SSH is going to look for id_dsa and id_rsa, and not github_dsa by default. using an SSH agent to hold the key as one to check is one option, the other option would be an IdentityFile line in your ~/.ssh/config, for example:

IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github_dsa

usually you would want to specify that line just for hostnames used by github, since adding it globally means that key will be tried against any host you SSH to.

if you don't want to manually add the SSH key each time, you might consider setting up a session-wide SSH agent, for example, seahorse to start at login.