Set up SSH to auth GitHub in a Terminal session

Verify the existence of the directory ~/.ssh

• Let's verify if we have a directory called .ssh in the root (cd ~). We can verify by changing to that directory cd ~/.ssh

Creating the .ssh directory

• If we don't have the directory then we create it: mkdir ~/.ssh.

Generate a new key

• If we have the directory, then we generate a key by

ssh-keygen

• We press ENTER to save the key in our directory /Users/user-name/.ssh/id_rsa

• If we want a password that protect the key, we enter a passphrase and click ENTER, and we repeat the same passphrase settled later and press ENTERagain.

  • If we don't want to, we just left it empty and press ENTER.

Add the public password to Github

• Look and copy the public password:

cat id_rsa.pub

• We go to Settings profile:
  

• Then we move to SSH and GPG keys:
  

• And we add a New SSH key by adding a Title, the use of that key (in our case Authentication key), and the public key generated from the public password (cat id_rsa.pub).
  

  • Note: The key we use is the public one, from the id_rsa.pub, NOT the id_rsakey.

Adding an agent to hold the ssh key.

An agent holds the public and private key for authenticate into services, in our case GitHub.

• Start the agent:

eval $(ssh-agent -s)

• Add the password to the agent:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Testing

Now in our session is validated to use push and clone on our public and private repositories.

Basic Test

git init
git add .

• Then we add the SSH link from a GitHub Repository:

git remote add origin [e-mail]:user/Repo_Name

• We make our commit:

git commit -m "First Commit"

So when we do some git push -u origin master the authentication will be settled.