Question

I’m setting up git on my new Windows 7 machine and I’m hitting a roadblock when it comes to getting github to acknowledge my ssh key. I am doing things a little different from the standard script in that I would rather not use cygwin and prefer to use my powershell prompt. The following is what I did:

1. I installed msysgit (portable).
2. I went to C:\program files\git\bin and used ssh-keygen to generate a public/private ssh keypair which I put in c:\Temp
3. I then created a directory named .ssh\ in c:\Users\myusername\ (on windows 7)
4. I moved both the files generated by the ssh-keygen (id_rsa and id_rsa.pub) into the .ssh directory
5. I went to my account on github, created a new public key, copy-pasted the contents of id_rsa.pub into it and saved
6. I now go to my powershell prompt, set-alias git ‘C:\program files\git\bin\git.exe’

7. I try to now do a clone [e-mail]:togakangaroo/ps-profile.git which rejects my authentication:

   Permission denied (publickey).
   fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Past experience says that this means git is not recognizing my key. What steps am I missing?

I have a feeling that I need to somehow configure git so that it knows where my ssh keys are (though it would seem it should look there automatically) but I don’t know how to do that.

Another possible clue is that when I try to run git config –global user.name “George Mauer”
I get an error

fatal: $HOME not set

I did however set up a HOME environment user variable with the value %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%

Answer 1

The command you’re looking for is:
ssh-add C:\path\to\key

First, you may want to find out where ssh is currently looking for your keys, by running ssh -v [e-mail]