Specifying a private key when connecting to a remote SSH repo

[Breck Yunits]

It would be very helpful if you could specify the path to the private
key to use for ssh remotes just like in ssh.

```
git push origin master -i 'path_to_key'
```

Althought there are workarounds involving ssh config, if you have a
server that has hundreds of git repos, each with the own private key,
those workarounds become unusable.

This is a very popular request with thousands of comments about it, for example:

http://superuser.com/questions/232373/tell-git-which-private-key-to-use

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3496037/how-to-specify-which-ssh-key-to-use-within-git-for-git-push-in-order-to-have-git

Thoughts?

Thanks!

Breck Yunits
bre...@gmail.com
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Re: Specifying a private key when connecting to a remote SSH repo

[Breck Yunits]

Thanks very much for the feedback and implementation suggestions.

 If the only thing you are interested in supporting is a one-shot
 invocation, i.e. giving which identity file to use from the command
 line when you run either git push or git fetch,

Yes, this is the new option that could benefit the most people.

I think this workflow would be very fast and make it very easy to have
1 key per project right where you need it:

```
mkdir project
cd project
ssh-keygen -t rsa -N  -f deploy.key
git init
echo deploy.key*  .gitignore
echo Hello world  readme.md
git add .
git commit -m Initial commit
git remote add origin g...@github.com:breck7/project.git
git push -u origin master -ssh -i deploy.key
```

This probably wouldn't be the option used most frequently, but could
be a neat option to have for both power users and new users.

For power users, I could see this being useful if you have many
projects that all have different keys.

For new users, I could see this is as a quick way to get out of
trouble if you are running into ssh problems.

-Breck


On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 8:43 AM, Junio C Hamano gits...@pobox.com wrote:
 Jeff King p...@peff.net writes:

 We already have GIT_SSH, so I would expect:

   GIT_SSH='ssh -i $HOME/.ssh/id_for_example_com' git push

 to work. But sadly, GIT_SSH does not use the shell, unlike most other
 configure git commands. :(

 You read me correctly ;-)

 We could consider it a consistency bug and fix it, though I suspect we
 may be annoying people on Windows who have spaces in their paths.

 Again, you read me correctly ;-)

 You could write a credential helper shell script that knows about
 classes of remotes (e.g., selecting an identity file based on the
 hostname), and write only a few lines to cover a large number of hosts.

 Yes, but the same trick can be used in $HOME/.ssh/config to let one
 entry cover the same large number of hosts, so...

 For example:

   #!/bin/sh
   test $1 = get || exit 0
   while IFS== read key val; do
 test $key = host || continue
 case $val in
   *.example.com) echo sshident=com_key ;;
   *.example.net) echo sshident=net_key ;;
 esac
   done

 But it feels a bit hacky to be using the credential helpers at all for
 ssh connections.

 Yeah, perhaps.
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