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SSH on Windows

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Chawye Hsu edited this page Jan 12, 2019 · 9 revisions

This guide will help you use SSH on Windows to connect to an SSH server. You'll get a similar experience to how SSH works on Linux on MacOS. No PuTTy or GUIs required, and you can even set it up so you don't have to re-type your private key password every time you connect.

This guide assumes you have installed Scoop and have a Linux machine running an SSH server—we'll need something to connect to. It also assumes that you're basically familiar with what SSH is all about and just want to know how to use it on Windows.

Install

If you're using Windows 10 version 1803 (April 2018) or above, a built-in win32-openssh has been installed in your system and been added to the system PATH. You can run scoop which ssh to locate the ssh that you're using, and you can chose to skip external openssh installation.

First, install SSH from a Powershell prompt:

scoop install openssh

P.S. if you want to use ssh with git, you may prefer to install git-with-openssh by scoop install git-with-openssh

Or, for the latest version of openssh:

scoop install win32-openssh

Connect with SSH using a password

Say you have a web server running at example.org. You should now be able to connect to it with

ssh username@example.org

Once you enter your password, you should be logged in to the remote server. Pat yourself on the back, you've connected with SSH from Windows! Easy, right?

Passwords are fine, but for extra security we can use a password-protected key instead. Let's set that up now.

Create a key for authentication

If you already have a private key (e.g. ~/.ssh/id_rsa) you can skip this step. If not, create a new private key like this (type text is in bold):

PS> ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/c/Users/username//.ssh/id_rsa): [enter]
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): your-super-secret-password
Enter same passphrase again: your-super-secret-password
Your identification has been saved in /c/Users/username//.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /c/Users/username//.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
d5:96:01:96:7a:63:25:93:a0:d6:65:0b:1a:a3:e7:05 username@COMPUTER
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ RSA 2048]----+
|      E o.=+.    |
|     . B ==o.o   |
|    . = o.o++    |
|     + ...+.     |
|      . So .     |
|                 |
|                 |
|                 |
|                 |
+-----------------+

If you used the default file as above, your private key will be created at ~/.ssh/id_rsa and your public key will be at ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

Connect with an SSH key

Before we can connect to our server (e.g. example.org) with our SSH key, we need to authorize the key we'll be using by copying our public key to the remote server:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh username@example.org 'mkdir -p ~/.ssh; cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

Now try connecting again:

ssh username@example.org

This time, instead of being asked for your username password, you should be asked for the password for your private key.

Better SSH experience with Pshazz

Now, every time you restart your PC and open a console session you need to start the SSH Agent manually, and every time you connect with ssh username@example.org you'll be asked for the private key password.

You can use Pshazz to automatically start the SSH Agent and cache your the key passphrase.

scoop install pshazz

Then Pshazz will start the SSH Agent automatically and add your keys. You'll be asked for the key passphrase for the first time. Try connecting over SSH:

ssh username@example.org

If everything went according to plan, you should be logged in without needing to enter your password. Hooray!

To see what happened, type:

ssh-add -l

The thumbprint for your SSH key should be shown. ssh-agent will try using this key whenever you use SSH now.

What's more, Pshazz support tab completion on ssh command:

ssh <TAB>

You will see all hosts in your ~/.ssh/config.

You might notice that your SSH sessions are timing out. To prevent this I like to add a ServerAliveInterval to my ~/.ssh/config (you might need to create this file if it doesn't exist):

Host *
    ServerAliveInterval 30

This will send a null packet to the remote server every 30 seconds to keep the connection alive.

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