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SSH stands for Secure Shell. It is the key that provides us with the credentials to access the SSH network protocol.

It provides access to remote servers between engines on an unsecured open network. It is used for transferring data, files, and network management, and provides access to remote servers from the source.

When a developer wants to securely push, pull, or copy files between a local Git installation and a remote Git repository, the first thing the developer needs to do is to create an SSH key pair on that server. Through this key, the developer and the authenticated developer's Git installation on the remote server will be identified.

Let's see how to generate an SSH key pair and then use this SSH key to push the modified work to the remote repository. Here are the details to generate an SSH key pair:

Generate SSH key pair

To create an SSH key pair, we will go to Git Bash; once opened, we will use the following command with our email ID:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "email@test.com"

Now we have to enter the location of the file and the password as requested.

As shown in the previous section, you can see that based on the details provided input, the key is generated using the RSA method specified above. After the key is generated, we have to use this key and push the necessary work to the remote repository.

Specifying SSH Keys

Sometimes, developers need another SSH key to be able to push their work to a given Git repository. Since ~/.ssh/id_rsa is the default server SSH deploy key, it does not allow developers to push local repositories in the developer workspace to a Git server that may have a unique host.

For this case where the username and hostname are the same, the developer should specify another SSH key and permissions in their ~/.ssh/config. Assume the configuration looks like the following definition.

Host git-as-anaa
  HostName git.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/home/key/xsshfile.thuc
  IdentitiesOnly yes

Host git-as-tomi
  HostName git.com
  User git
  IdentityFile /home/key/sshfile.ten
  IdentitiesOnly yes

If configured like this, developers will simply use github-as-anaaand github-as-tomi, replacing the original hostname (git.anaa.com) in their URLs.

$ git remote add anaa git@git-as-anaa:your-repo.git
$ git remote add tomi git@git-as-tomi:your-repo.git

The option IdentitiesOnly yesis used to stop using the default identity. On the other hand, if we also have identity files with the same name as the default, they will definitely be tried first, because the option IdentityFile is different from other configuration options and is appended to the list of identities to try.