Several tools exist to generate SSH public/private key pairs. The following sections show how to generate an SSH key pair on UNIX, UNIX-like and Windows platforms.
Jun 22, 2012 SSH keys provide a more secure way of logging into a virtual private server with SSH than using a password alone. With SSH keys, users can log into a server without a password. This tutorial explains how to generate, use, and upload an SSH Key Pair. Ensure that you generated your SSH key pair correctly and added the public SSH key to your GitLab profile; Try manually registering your private SSH key using ssh-agent as documented earlier in this document; Try to debug the connection by running ssh -Tv git@example.com (replacing example.com with your GitLab domain). Which is right as I did not put the Master SSH pub key on the Slave in the /.ssh/authorizedkeys. It looks like the Centos Yum install does not create ssh keys for the user running Jenkins, I did my Google fu and from what I read I need this to do what I want to do. Supported SSH key formats. Azure currently supports SSH protocol 2 (SSH-2) RSA public-private key pairs with a minimum length of 2048 bits. Other key formats such as ED25519 and ECDSA are not supported. Create an SSH key pair. Use the ssh-keygen command to generate SSH public and private key files. By default, these files are created in the. Apr 07, 2013 Integrating Jenkins with Gitolite. Applying what we no know of the Gitolite architecture then requires the following steps: generate an ssh key-pair. Generate an ssh key-pair with an empty passphrase on the jenkins server for the jenkins server. Creating a new key pair for authentication. To create a new key pair, select the type of key to generate from the bottom of the screen (using SSH-2 RSA with 2048 bit key size is good for most people; another good well-known alternative is ECDSA). Then click Generate, and start moving the mouse within the Window. Putty uses mouse movements to.
UNIX and UNIX-like platforms (including Solaris and Linux) include the ssh-keygen utility to generate SSH key pairs.
filename your choice of file name for the private key:The ssh-keygen utility prompts you for a passphrase for the private key.
Note:
While a passphrase is not required, you should specify one as a security measure to protect the private key from unauthorized use. When you specify a passphrase, a user must enter the passphrase every time the private key is used.
The ssh-keygen utility prompts you to enter the passphrase again.
filename and the public key has been saved as filename.pub. It also displays information about the key fingerprint and randomart image.The PuTTYgen program is part of PuTTY, an open source networking client for the Windows platform.
To download PuTTY or PuTTYgen, go to http://www.putty.org/ and click the You can download PuTTY here link.
As the key is being generated, move the mouse around the blank area as directed.
Note:
While a passphrase is not required, you should specify one as a security measure to protect the private key from unauthorized use. When you specify a passphrase, a user must enter the passphrase every time the private key is used.
.ppk (PuTTY private key).Note:
The.ppk file extension indicates that the private key is in PuTTY's proprietary format. You must use a key of this format when using PuTTY as your SSH client. It cannot be used with other SSH client tools. Refer to the PuTTY documentation to convert a private key in this format to a different format. Make sure you select all the characters, not just the ones you can see in the narrow window. If a scroll bar is next to the characters, you aren't seeing all the characters.
.pub extension to indicate that the file contains a public key.ssh utility on Linux), export the private key:.ppk format, using an extension such as .openssh to indicate the file's content.With many of the tools commonly used in a Continuous Delivery pipeline, Windows is not the original OS the tool was developed for. Although support and adoption are growing all the time, there can still be some pain points and gotchas in configuring some of them to work as you would expect on a Windows OS.
In this post, we’re going to combine two of the big hitters in this space, Jenkins and Git. Jenkins is the most widely adopted solution for automating build and CI/CD pipelines and Git is the dominant force in source control management. We’re going to get Jenkins talking to a remote Git repository, specifically a private GitHub repository, using SSH authentication.
Git was developed specifically for managing the development of the Linux kernel (by Linus Torvolds himself no less) and was brought to Windows as an afterthought. Git comes bundled with OpenSSH, which does not yet have a production-ready implementation on Windows, although Microsoft is working on one that is currently pre-release [Win32-OpenSSH]. For this reason, Git for Windows is bundled with MINGW, a minimal GNU development environment that runs on Windows.
With that background out of the way, let’s get started.
| Tool | Version used in this post | Link | Notes |
| Jenkins | 2.60.2 | https://jenkins.io/ | |
| Git Plugin/Git Client Plugin (Jenkins) | 3.5.1/2.5.0 | https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Git+Plugin | |
| Git for Windows | 2.14.1 | https://git-scm.com/downloads | Includes MINGW and OpenSSH |
| PsExec | 2.2 | https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/psexec |
The first “gotcha” is how you install Git on the Jenkins worker in the first place. The Git plugin for Jenkins is not yet compatible with the Git Credential Manager for Windows. Ensure that you uncheck the box for this option at installation time.
If you see Jenkins hanging and timing out after ten minutes when executing a git fetch, this is a sign that you have the Git Credential Manager installed. The job is hanging because the Git Credential Manager has intercepted the command and is ignoring any other preconfigured authentication mechanism.
The only way around this at the moment is to choose not to install it.
After installation, our first job is to configure the Tool Location for Git. First, let’s figure out what the location is. Open PowerShell and input:
This will output something similar to:
Copy the path to git.exe.
In Jenkins, click Manage Jenkins then Configure System. In Global properties check Tool Locations, select (Git) Default and enter the path to git.exe in the Home textbox.

Save and exit the page.
On Windows, the Jenkins services run as the Local System user by default, not your own user identity. It’s important to understand that Jenkins will be executing the Git commands and authenticating in the context of that user identity. This is important because OpenSSH will look for the SSH keys in the home directory of the user and the Local System account does not use the same home directory that your own personal account has.
You probably don’t know what your Local System account considers its home directory. To find out, you need to start a command prompt as the Local System user and resolve %UserProfile%, but that’s easier said than done.
One way to run a process as the Local System account is to use PsExec, a Sysinternals tool that is normally used to execute programs on remote hosts. Using the -s parameter starts the process as Local System, so execute the following from PowerShell:
This will open a command prompt as Local System. Then resolve %UserProfile%:
This will output a path similar to:
So for me, C:WINDOWSsystem32configsystemprofile is the home directory of my Local Service account.
One approach to enabling your Local Service account to work over SSH with a remote repo is to copy the .ssh directory from your personal home directory (containing previously generated and configured keys) over to the Local Service home directory, so that it effectively uses the same identity as your personal account over SSH. But I prefer to keep Local Service as a separate identity with its own keys, so generating new SSH keys is what we will be doing next.
From the Local Service command prompt you started with PsExec earlier, execute:
This will start Bash in a MINGW window, the minimal GNU environment for Windows that I mentioned earlier, as the Local System user.
Execute the following to generate a new public and private RSA key with OpenSSH:
The proposed location of the keys will default to the home directory of the Local Service account that you discovered earlier, keep this default. When OpenSSH asks for a passphrase, just press Enter (and again on confirmation) to opt for no passphrase.
It is, of course, better to use SSH keys that are encrypted with a passphrase, but I have found that the Git plugin for Jenkins does not work very well with SSH keys that require a passphrase, even though its Credentials UI does allow you to enter one.
That whole workflow should look similar to the below:
You should see that there is now a .ssh directory in the Local Service home directory containing a public and private key pair. id_rsa.pub is the public key and is_rsa is the private key. The local Jenkins server will use the private key and the remote Git server will use the public key.
This next part is quite simple, we’re going to register the public key with our remote Git server. I’m going to use my personal GitHub, but it should be simple to replace these steps with the equivalents for the likes of BitBucket, etc.
And we’re done. Let’s test that we can now authenticate successfully with the corresponding private key.

Back in the MINGW shell (still running as our Local Service account) enter the following to connect to GitHub with SSH:
You will probably find that github.com is not yet a known host and you will get a prompt similar to below.
Just enter yes to accept the connection. On successfully connecting you will see:
We can see that the keys are correctly associated with our GitHub account.
Now all that remains is to test everything with a Jenkins project. For this I have a private GitHub repository containing the following Jenkinsfile:
This pipeline script just outputs “Hello, World!” to the console output, so nothing too interesting. Now we just need a Jenkins job to execute it:
The “Pipeline script from SCM” option means that the job definition lives in the SCM system itself and must be fetched to run. Our job won’t work at all if Jenkins isn’t successful in authenticating with GitHub using our SSH keys.
Make sure that the Repository URL is in a form that will use SSH to authenticate. A HTTPS URI, e.g. https://github.com/user/repo.git, will be expecting a username and password. See Git – The Protocols for more information.
Because OpenSSH will default to looking in %UserProfile%.ssh for keys, we don’t actually need to tell Jenkins what the private key is. So I’ve associated no credentials with this test job. Of course, you could choose to if you had a need.
If we run this, we should see:
We can see “Hello, World!” so we successfully fetched the job definition from the private Git repository.