Git keeps asking for ssh passphrase when SSH is already defined in GitLab

Question

I'm playing around with a personal GitLab account to get familiar with its' ins and outs. First, I followed this primer on setting ssh keys and added public and private ED25519 keys to ~\.ssh. I added the public key to my GitLab account. Then, using the glab CLI I was able to set up a repository which I could push to and pull from using git.

Unfortunately, git still prompts me for my SSH passphrase every time I try to push to the repo. I tried the following:

• Adding known hosts entries
• Verifying that I could connect using ssh -T https://gitlab.com/my_username

The known host entries didn't have any noticeable effect on this behavior. Verifying I could connect threw the following error:

ssh: Could not resolve hostname https://gitlab.com/my_username

Why is git asking me to provide my passphrase every time I push and how can I fix this once and for all?

Answer 1

Passphrase is defined by the way you created your private key. When creating a key pair you need to opt for no passphrase on the private key - this should solve your issue.

Answer 2

You can try adding your passphrase to the keychain using ssh-add -K, this will ask you the passphrase for the first time and later on it won't ask.