Putty Authentication on Mac OS X?

On my Windows development machine, I use Pageant with a secret key to authenticate with an SVN server.

I want to know: what's the equivalent Mac process for doing this? Pageant isn't ported, how do I authenticate?

4 Answers

I use SSH Keychain on my Mac to manage my ssh key agent and attached keys. It runs ssh-agent, and ssh-add to manage the keys behind the scenes, but starts up when I login, stores the passphrase in OSX login keychain (you don't have to do this, though).

ssh-add and ssh-agent are the equivalent tools, which are built in. Best way is to read any tutorial for linux or os x in setting up auth with ssh, it will be the same.

Pageant is a Windows workaround for not having OpenSSH installed. Since modern macs are UNIX, you don't have to install anything!

Here's a quick rundown on how to set it up

For me ~/.ssh/config file works best. Add to it groups of configs using this scheme:

host shortname user my_username hostname host.of.the.server.example.com IdentityFile ~/.ssh/key.openssh 

and then

ssh shortname 

will connect using that settings, including the key. This lets you have lots of different keys for different hosts without having to add them all to ssh-agent.