I'm trying to get Remote-SSH working with ssh-agent, from Windows 7 desktop to CentOs 7 server.
I'm using ssh, ssh-add and ssh-agent from the Git for windows package. From the cmd prompt, this is all working fine, I can "ssh-add -l" and see the keys, and I can run "ssh " and it runs with no problems and without asking for password:
C:\Users\gnb>"c:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\ssh-add.exe" -l
4096 SHA256:zg2IR6OlPwCGP8SzcbriXIQjth5zuDc9rbO6uaNPmcU gnb@VDI028-MEL (RSA)
C:\Users\gnb>ssh vdi ls
Desktop
tsclient
wkspace
C:\Users\gnb>
From within VS-Code, I can't get this to work. Running the exact same ssh-add command from within the VS-Code Terminal does not seem to find the agent:
C:\Users\gnb>"c:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\ssh-add.exe" -l
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.
The actual remote functionality in VS-Code more or less works, but keeps stopping to ask for passwords.
What's missing here? Why can the vs-code environment not connect to the ssh-agent?
OK, I've had a few more hours playing around with this and I think I understand what's going on.
It only works from cmd if it is the same cmd window that was used to start the agent. Opening a new cmd window then ssh gets the same msg as starting vs-code from the menu - can't find the agent. It appears that the start-ssh-agent script that comes with git/ssh on Win7 is setting some environment variables or some such that the ssh client needs. This does make sense, Unix ssh-agent acts the same way, but I'm clearly not used to thinking about windows apps in those terms.
It also seems the start-ssg-agent script will set the environment variables to point to an existing agent if one is running, else will create a new agent. So a 2 line batch file
start-ssh-agent
code
will reliably start up VS Code with the ssh-agent. If you name the identity file in the ssh config, vs-code will add they key to the agent when required. Otherwise you need to manually add the key to the agent, or fall back to entering the password all the time.
Suspect the better solution is to be on Win10 and use ssh-agent as a service, which should mean VS-code should find the agent when run from a menu. But I can't test that.