Start ssh-agent on login

Question

I have a site as a remote Git repo pulling from Bitbucket.com using an SSH alias. I can manually start the ssh-agent on my server but I have to do this every time I login via SSH.

I manually start the ssh-agent:

eval ssh-agent $SHELL

Then I add the agent:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/bitbucket_id

Then it shows up when I do:

ssh-add -l

And I'm good to go. Is there any way to automate this process so I don't have to do it every time I login? The server is running RedHat 6.2 (Santiago).

Answer 1

Please go through this article. You may find this very useful:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210506080335/https://mah.everybody.org/docs/ssh

Just in case the above link vanishes some day, I am capturing the main piece of the solution below:

This solution from Joseph M. Reagle by way of Daniel Starin:

Add this following to your .bash_profile

SSH_ENV="$HOME/.ssh/agent-environment"

function start_agent {
    echo "Initialising new SSH agent..."
    /usr/bin/ssh-agent | sed 's/^echo/#echo/' >"${SSH_ENV}"
    echo succeeded
    chmod 600 "${SSH_ENV}"
    . "${SSH_ENV}" >/dev/null
    /usr/bin/ssh-add;
}

# Source SSH settings, if applicable

if [ -f "${SSH_ENV}" ]; then
    . "${SSH_ENV}" >/dev/null
    #ps ${SSH_AGENT_PID} doesn't work under Cygwin
    ps -ef | grep ${SSH_AGENT_PID} | grep ssh-agent$ >/dev/null || {
        start_agent;
    }
else
    start_agent;
fi

This version is especially nice since it will see if you've already started ssh-agent and, if it can't find it, will start it up and store the settings so that they'll be usable the next time you start up a shell.