How-to: Enter your SSH key passphrase only once per terminal session

Mar 18, 2021 13:00 · 143 words · 1 minute read

This is one of the things that is always very annoying when setting up a new computer & one of the things I always forget how to do.

  1. Open your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc (depending on whether you use Bash or Zsh1) and append this line to the bottom of the file:
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[ -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ] && eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
  1. Open or create ~/.ssh/config and add these two lines:
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Host *
    AddKeysToAgent yes
  1. Close and re-open your terminal again. You should see something Agent pid 28473 being printed out.

Whenever you do something like git pull again, you will be asked for your SSH passphrase only once per terminal session - not every time. Yeah! 😁

  1. If you are not sure which shell you are using, enter echo $0 into your terminal ⇒ the output will likely include bash or zsh. ↩︎