Loading my private key for use in git on Mac

Question

I'm trying to use git on a Mac (I'm a Mac newbie.) I obviously have to load my private key. On my Windows machine I just use pageant and msysgit. How do I load my private key into git on the Mac?

Solution

If you open the key with PuTTY Key Generator, you can export your key in the OpenSSH format. Just copy that to your mac and put it as a file named id_rsa in your ~/.ssh directory (which you'll have to create if you haven't run ssh-keygen).

If it's not too much trouble though you can just use ssh-keygen to create a new key pair and add the new id_rsa.pub public key to the account you're accessing. Most online git repositories and ssh hosts (like Winsshd) allow you to link multiple keys to an account.