set git for windows
If you came to this page because you don't have SSH set up, then you have been using the secure hypertext transfer protocol (HTTPS) to communicate between your local system and Bitbucket Cloud. When you use HTTPS, you authenticate (supply a username and password) each time you take an action that requires a connection with Bitbucket. Who wants to do that? This page shows you how to use secure shell (SSH) to communicate with the Bitbucket server and avoid having to manually type a password all the time.
Set up SSH
Setting up an SSH identity can be prone to error. Allow yourself some time, perhaps as much as an hour depending on your experience, to complete this page. If you run into issues, check out Troubleshoot SSH Issues for extra information that may help you along. You can even skip this whole page and continue to use HTTPS if you want.
The following sections cover how to set up SSH for Git.
To use SSH with Bitbucket, you create an SSH identity. An identity consists of a private and a public key which together are a key pair. The private key resides on your local computer and the public you upload to your Bitbucket account. Once you upload a public key to your account, you can use SSH to connect with repositories you own and repositories owned by others, provided those other owners give your account permissions. By setting up SSH between your local system and the Bitbucket server, your system uses the key pair to automate authentication; you won't need to enter your password each time you interact with your Bitbucket repository.
There are a few important concepts you need when working with SSH identities and Bitbucket.
- You cannot reuse an identity's public key across accounts. If you have multiple Bitbucket accounts, you must create multiple identities and upload their corresponding public keys to each individual account.
- You can associate multiple identities with a Bitbucket account. You would create multiple identities for the same account if, for example, you access a repository from a work computer and a home computer. You might create multiple identities if you wanted to execute DVCS actions on a repository with a script – the script would use a public key with an empty passphrase, allowing it to run without human intervention.
-
RSA (R. Rivest, A. Shamir, L. Adleman are the originators) and digital signature algorithm (DSA) are key encryption algorithms. Bitbucket supports both types of algorithms. You should create identities using whichever encryption method is most comfortable and available to you.
Step 1. Ensure you have an SSH client installed
SSH should be included with the version of Git you installed. To make sure, do the following to verify your installation:
-
From the Git Bash window, enter the following command to verify that SSH client is available:
$ ssh -v
OpenSSH_4.6p1, OpenSSL 0.9.8e 23 Feb 2007
usage: ssh [-1246AaCfgkMNnqsTtVvXxY] [-b bind_address] [-c cipher_spec]
[-D [bind_address:]port] [-e escape_char] [-F configfile]
[-i identity_file] [-L [bind_address:]port:host:hostport]
[-l login_name] [-m mac_spec] [-O ctl_cmd] [-o option] [-p port]
[-R [bind_address:]port:host:hostport] [-S ctl_path]
[-w local_tun[:remote_tun]] [user@]hostname [command]If you have
ssh
installed, the terminal returns version information.If you don't have
ssh
installed, install it now with your package manager. -
List the contents of your
~/.ssh
directory.
If you have not used SSH on Git Bash yet, you might see something like this:$ ls -a ~/.ssh
ls: /c/Users/emmap1/.ssh: No such file or directoryIf you have a default identity already, you'll see two
id_*
files:$ ls -a ~/.ssh
. .. id_rsa id_rsa.pub known_hostsIn this case, the default identity uses RSA encryption (
id_rsa.pub
). If you want to use an existing default identity for your Bitbucket account, skip the next section and go to create a config file.
Step 2. Set up your default identity
By default, the system adds keys for all identities to the /Users/<yourname>/.ssh
directory. The following procedure creates a default identity.
- Open a terminal in your local system.
-
Enter
ssh-keygen
at the command line.
The command prompts you for a file to save the key in:$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/c/Users/emmap1/.ssh/id_rsa): -
Press enter to accept the default key and path,
/c/Users/<yourname>/.ssh/id_rsa
, or you can create a key with another name.
To create a key with a name other than the default, specify the full path to the key. For example, to create a key calledmy-new-ssh-key
, you would enter a path like this at the prompt:$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/c/Documents and Settings/emmap1/.ssh/id_rsa): /c/Users/emmap1/My Documents/keys/my-new-ssh-key -
Enter and renter a passphrase when prompted.
Unless you need a key for a process such as script, you should always provide a passphrase.
The command creates your default identity with its public and private keys. The whole interaction looks similar to the following:$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/c/Users/emmap1/.ssh/id_rsa):
Created directory '/c/Users/emmap1/.ssh'.
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /c/Users/emmap1/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /c/Users/emmap1/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is: e7:94:d1:a3:02:ee:38:6e:a4:5e:26:a3:a9:f4:95:d4 emmap1@EMMA-PC -
List the contents of
~/.ssh
to view the key files.
You should see something like the following:$ ls ~/.ssh
id_rsa id_rsa.pubThe command created two files, one for the public key (for example
id_rsa.pub
) and one for the private key (for example,id_rsa
).
Step 3. Create a SSH config file
-
Using your favorite text editor, create a new file (at
~/.ssh/config
) or edit the file if it already exists. -
Add an entry to the configuration file using the following format:
1Host bitbucket.org
2IdentityFile ~/.ssh/<privatekeyfile>
The second line is indented. That indentation (a single space) is important, so make sure you include it. The second line is the location of your private key file. If you are following along with these instructions, enter
id_rsa
for<
privatekeyfile>
.When you are done editing, your configuration looks similar to the following:
1Host bitbucket.org
2IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
- Save and close the file.
- Restart the GitBash terminal.
Step 4. Update your .bashrc profile file
It is a good idea to configure your GitBash shell to automatically start the agent when you launch GitBash. The .bashrc
file is the shell initialization file. It contains commands that run each time your GitBash shell starts. You can add commands to the.bashrc
file that start the agent when you start GitBash. The folks at GitHub have developed a nice script for this (their script was developed from a post by Joseph M. Reagle Jr. from MIT on the cygwin list). To start the agent automatically, do the following.
- Start GitBash.
-
Edit your
If you don't have a~/.bashrc
file..bashrc
file you can create the file using your favorite text editor. Keep in mind the file must be in your~
(home) directory and must be named exactly .bashrc
. -
Add the following lines to the file:
Chrome and Opera introduce ASCII \xa0 (non-breaking space characters) on paste that can appear in your destination file. If you copy and paste the lines below, copy from another browser to avoid this problem.
1SSH_ENV=$HOME/.ssh/environment
23# start the ssh-agent
4function start_agent {
5echo "Initializing new SSH agent..."
6# spawn ssh-agent
7/usr/bin/ssh-agent | sed 's/^echo/#echo/' > "${SSH_ENV}"
8echo succeeded
9chmod 600 "${SSH_ENV}"
10. "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
11/usr/bin/ssh-add
12}
1314if [ -f "${SSH_ENV}" ]; then
15. "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
16ps -ef | grep ${SSH_AGENT_PID} | grep ssh-agent$ > /dev/null || {
17start_agent;
18}
19else
20start_agent;
21fi
- Save and close the file.
- Close GitBash, then reopen GitBash.
-
The system prompts you for your passphrase:
1Welcome to Git (version 1.7.8-preview20111206)
2Run 'git help git' to display the help index.
3Run 'git help <command>' to display help for specific commands.
4Enter passphrase for /c/Documents and Settings/manthony/.ssh/id_rsa:
- Enter your passphrase.
After accepting your passphrase, the system displays the command shell prompt. -
Verify that the script identity added your identity successfully by querying the SSH agent:
$ ssh-add -l
2048 0f:37:21:af:1b:31:d5:cd:65:58:b2:68:4a:ba:a2:46 /Users/manthony/.ssh/id_rsa (RSA)
After you install your public key to Bitbucket, having this script should prevent you from having to enter a password each time you push or pull a repository from Bitbucket.
Step 5. Install the public key on your Bitbucket account
- From Bitbucket, choose avatar > Settings from the application menu.
The system displays the Account settings page. - Click SSH keys.
The SSH keys page displays. It shows a list of any existing keys. Then, below that, a dialog for labeling and entering a new key. -
In your terminal window,
cat
the contents of the public key file by entering the following:$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
-
Select and copy the key output in the clipboard.
If you have problems with copy and paste, you can open the file directly with Notepad. Select the contents of the file (just avoid selecting the end-of-file character). -
Back in your browser, enter a Label for your new key, for example,
Default public key
. - Paste the copied public key into the SSH Key field.
- Press Add key.
The system adds the key to your account. Bitbucket sends you an email to confirm addition of the key. -
Return to the terminal window and verify your configuration by entering the following command.
$ ssh -T git@bitbucket.org
The command message tells you which Bitbucket account can log in with that key.
1conq: logged in as tutorials.
2You can use git or hg to connect to Bitbucket. Shell access is disabled.
-
Verify that the command returns your account name.
Click if you got a permission denied (publickey) message.
Step 6. Configure your repository to use the SSH protocol
The URL you use for a repo depends on which protocol you are using, HTTPS or SSH. The Clone button of theBitbucketSpaceStation repository has a quick way for you to see these URLS.
Experiment for a moment, clicking back and forth between the SSH and the HTTPS protocol links to see how the URLs differ. The table below shows the format based on protocol.
SSH URL format |
or
|
---|---|
HTTPS URL format | https://<accountname>@bitbucket.org/< accountname>/<reponame>.git |
To make the change, go to a terminal on your local system and navigate to your bitbucketspacestation
repo. Then, do the following:
-
View your current repo configuration.
You should see something similar to the following:$ cd ~/repos/bitbucketspacestation
$ cat .git/config
[core]
repositoryformatversion = 0
filemode = true
bare = false
logallrefupdates = true
ignorecase = true
precomposeunicode = true
[remote "origin"]
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
url = https://emmap1@bitbucket.org/emmap1/bitbucketspacestation.git
[branch "master"]
remote = origin
merge = refs/heads/masterAs you can see, the
url
is using the HTTPS protocol. There are a number of ways to change this value, the easiest way is just to edit the repo's configuration file. - Open the
~/repos/bitbucketspacestation/.git/config
file with your favorite editor. -
Change the
url
value to use the SSH format for that repo.
When you are done you should see something similar to the following:1[remote "origin"]
2fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
3url = git@bitbucket.org:emmap1/bitbucketspacestation.git
Step 7. Make a change under the new protocol
- Edit the
README
file in your repository. -
Add a new line to the file, for example:
1Welcome to My First Repo
2-------------------------------
3This repo is a practice repo I am using to learn bitbucket.
4You can access this repo with SSH or with HTTPS.
- Save and close the file.
-
Add and then commit your change to your local repo.
$ git add README
$ git commit -m "making a change under the SSH protocol" -
Push your changes.
The system warns you that it is adding the Bitbucket host to the list of known hosts.$ git push
Counting objects: 5, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 287 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: bb/acl: newuserme is allowed. accepted payload.
To git@bitbucket.org:newuserme/bb101repo.git
056c29c..205e9a8 master -> master - Open the repo Overview in Bitbucket to view your commit.