Using the SSH agent in WSL2

Topics: Secure Shell, Windows Subsystem for Linux

The keychain utility makes using Secure Shell with passphrase authentication much easier. It detects if an SSH agent process is already running; if not, it’ll start one. Via ssh-askpass, it’ll also make sure the agent knows your passphrase.

Source

Setup

Install packages:

apt install keychain ssh-askpass

Add this to your shell startup script(s):

/usr/bin/keychain -q --nogui ~/.ssh/id_rsa
source ~/.keychain/$(hostname)-sh