It is possible to store the passphrases of all of your SSH keys securely in Keychain, from which ssh-agent will read them on startup. Solution 2Īs of the Leopard release of OS X, ssh-agent is more tightly integrated with Keychain. That process will be started automatically by launch services the first time something tries to read that socket in /tmp. Your bash scripts are starting your own ssh agent (spelled ssh-agent, not ssh_agent) and overriding the existing ssh-agent that is set up for you at login.Īlso, the whole point of the keychain is to store the passwords to your ssh keys, but you say that you don't have passphrases set on those keys, so I'm not sure what you are expecting out of the keychain integration.įinally, when you first log in, you probably won't see a ssh-agent process. The listener on that socket speaks the ssh-agent protocol. This is supposed to be done automatically when you log in. For it to work, the $SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable should be pointed to /tmp/launch-xxxxxx/Listeners.

Ssh for mac os x