IMPORTANT - GitHub Contributors

Please apply your patches to keychain.sh, not the generated keychain script, which we are now including in the git repo to facilitate the distribution of release archives direct from GitHub. All development work will be done on the 'devel' branch and will only be merged with the master branch when a new release is made. This should allow the generated files (keychain, man pages, spec file)to remain in sync on the master branch but no guarantees are made except for the tagged release. They will be regenerated for official release archives only (those tagged with the release version.). Anyone using or contributing to the 'devel' branch should assume the generated files are out of date and regenerate locally if needed. Thanks!

Introduction to Keychain

Official documentation for Keychain can be found on the official Keychain wiki page.

Keychain helps you to manage ssh and GPG keys in a convenient and secure manner. It acts as a frontend to ssh-agent and ssh-add, but allows you to easily have one long running ssh-agent process per system, rather than the norm of one ssh-agent per login session.

This dramatically reduces the number of times you need to enter your passphrase. With keychain, you only need to enter a passphrase once every time your local machine is rebooted. Keychain also makes it easy for remote cron jobs to securely "hook in" to a long running ssh-agent process, allowing your scripts to take advantage of key-based logins.