I’m trying to access a private remote SSH git repository via the Eclipse ‘egit’ module. I’m running Eclipse on Windows. Eclipse doesn’t seem to automagically work with putty’s pagent for authorization forwarding and I can’t find any documentation about customizing the SSH used by egit (e.g., to use plink.exe).
I’ve found documentation on the web about setting up other Windows git clients to use putty/plink (e.g., for msysgit), but I can’t seem to find anything about Eclipse’s egit and putty (or eclipse).
I’m confident the ssh key works normally, as I use it all the time to log into the server with Putty.
Specifically, I use the Git Repository Viewer, click ‘Clone Remote Repository’, fill in the host, repository path, protocol (ssh), and user. I Click ‘Next’. I can tell that its connecting because I get a pop-up with my server’s unique banner. Then I get a
Transport Error: Cannot list the available branches: Reason: <URI>: Auth fail
The ssh login is by sshkey only, so that’s why this doesn’t work (but at least it shows I’ve got the basics down).
Anyone have success with egit+pageant? Or know if its just not possible?
Update
It seems that this doesn’t work because Eclipse has a pure-Java SSH (jsch) implementation internally that it uses, and that implementation Eclipse contains does not (yet) support the authorization agent protocols.
Some patches to support platform ssh agents via the have been proposed (thanks to @Janning for the link). See this Eclipse bug 179924. Update #24 includes this encouraging note about the proposed patches:
I have confirmed that I can get accesses to http://github.com/ and clone
some projects by egit with putty’s pageant.
I’m not entirely sure, but it seems like the current hangups are some licensing issues around a pure-java unix-domain socket library, and upgrading the pure-java SSH implementation that Eclipse uses.
A more recent bug (number 360663) shows the required version of jsch has been committed to Eclipse (and as far as I can tell should be part of the next release — should be end of June 2012).
After reading morellet.d’s answer, I was able to set this up for myself very simply.
I added the user environment variable GIT_SSH and set it to “C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\plink.exe” So, you just need to set it to wherever your plink file is and it will work.
Instructions worked with PuTTY 0.62, the latest EGit and Eclipse Juno x64.