Using 1Password SSH agent to authenticate with Git and sign commits

Streamline GitHub authentication and automatically sign commits using 1Password’s SSH agent

Introduction

As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, I use 1Password as my password manager. Besides storing my usual login information, it also helps me manage API keys, software licences, and SSH keys.

1Password also includes an SSH agent — If you use it over native SSH agent, you don’t need to keep private keys stored on the machine I’m working on. Also it authenticates your Git and SSH clients without those clients ever being able to read your private key.

In this post, I’ll demonstrate how I use SSH keys stored in 1Password along with the 1Password SSH agent to authenticate with GitHub and sign commits.

Enable 1Password SSH Agent

For this to work, we need to ensure we have enabled SSH agent in 1Password settings.

Use 1Password SSH agent

In your ~/.ssh/config file, ensure IdentityAgent set to below path. I have also mentioned IdentityFile of the public key.

Host github.com
    HostName github.com
    IdentityFile…