How do I remove the passphrase for the SSH key without having to create a new key?

Question

I set a passphrase when creating a new SSH key on my laptop. But, as I realise now, this is quite painful when you are trying to commit (Git and SVN) to a remote location over SSH many times in an hour.

One way I can think of is, delete my SSH keys and create new. Is there a way to remove the passphrase, while still keeping the same keys?

Answer 1

Short answer:

$ ssh-keygen -p

This will then prompt you to enter the keyfile location, the old passphrase, and the new passphrase (which can be left blank to have no passphrase).

If you would like to do it all on one line without prompts do:

$ ssh-keygen -p [-P old_passphrase] [-N new_passphrase] [-f keyfile]

Important: Beware that when executing commands they will typically be logged in your ~/.bash_history file (or similar) in plain text including all arguments provided (i.e. the passphrases in this case). It is therefore is recommended that you use the first option unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise. Notice though that you can still use -f keyfile without having to specify -P nor -N, and that the keyfile defaults to ~/.ssh/id_rsa, so in many cases it's not even needed.

You might want to consider using ssh-agent, which can cache the passphrase for a time. The latest versions of gpg-agent also support the protocol that is used by ssh-agent.

Answer 2

You might want to add the following to your .bash_profile (or equivalent), which starts ssh-agent on login.

if [ -f ~/.agent.env ] ; then
    . ~/.agent.env > /dev/null
    if ! kill -0 $SSH_AGENT_PID > /dev/null 2>&1; then
        echo "Stale agent file found. Spawning new agent… "
        eval `ssh-agent | tee ~/.agent.env`
        ssh-add
    fi 
else
    echo "Starting ssh-agent"
    eval `ssh-agent | tee ~/.agent.env`
    ssh-add
fi

On some Linux distros (Ubuntu, Debian) you can use:

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub username@host

This will copy the generated id to a remote machine and add it to the remote keychain.

You can read more here and here.

Answer 3

$ ssh-keygen -p worked for me

Opened git bash. Pasted : $ ssh-keygen -p

Hit enter for default location.

Enter old passphrase

Enter new passphrase - BLANK

Confirm new passphrase - BLANK

BOOM the pain of entering passphrase for git push was gone.

Thanks!