sagent

Generate a re-usable ssh-agent for ssh key forwarding

The classic use-case is to do git pull on a remote server without copying your ssh keys to the remote server's disk.

export SSH_AUTH_SOCK="$(sagent)"
ssh -A remoteserver.com
git pull

It will helpfully re-use any existing ssh-agent processes, so you dont need to worry about spawning too many. It will only ever spawn a new ssh-agent process if needed.

This script can be called in one of two ways:

• export SSH_AUTH_SOCK="$(sagent)"
• source /path/to/sagent

Best is to put it in your bash profile so that an agent will always be ready to go when you need it

echo 'export SSH_AUTH_SOCK="$(sagent)"' > ~/.bashrc

Once sagent has been called, you can then use ssh -A remote-server.com to forward your ssh keys. You can also edit your ssh_config file to always forward keys to certain hosts (without passing -A to ssh). See https://developer.github.com/guides/using-ssh-agent-forwarding for more info on how to do this.