Set up SSH key authentication

In order to transfer information between GitHub or Gitlab and your local machine, you need to authenticate yourself to the remote server. If you use GitHub + GitHub Desktop, they take care of this for you. Otherwise, you need to setup SSH authentication with SSH keys. You can also authenticate using a personal access token (PAT) instead but here we will stick with SSH keys here.

If you want a good and simple explanation of how SSH works, checkout the video below

Check of you already have an SSH key set up

If you are not sure if you already set up authentication via ssh on your machine, you can try the following:

• Can you push to GitHub/Gitlab from the command line without having to provide credentials (except for SSH key password)?
  • If yes, then you already set up authentication.
• Run ssh -T git@github.com or ssh - T git@gitlab.com in the terminal (Git bash for Windows users). If GitHub/Gitlab welcomes you with your correct user account, you are all set.

If you don’t have an SSH key set up, please follow the steps below.

SSH-authentication for Gitlab

Please follow this guide

If you prefer a video, you can check out this one. It is for Gitlab but works the same for GitHub.

SSH-authentication for GitHub

Complete the following steps:

• Check for existing SSH keys
• Generate an SSH key and add it to SSH-agent
• Add your public key to your GitHub account

Test the connection

To test if the setup was successful, run ssh -T git@github.com or ssh -T git@gitlab.com and see if Gitlab or GitHub answer to you.