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ssh-add – Could not open a connection to your authentication agent

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When working with gitlab, to push our source code server we need to add the SSH key from our machine to gitlab.. while doing so, we may face some errors / warnings in setup.. one such error can be seen when try to add SSH key to OpenSSH authentication agent using “ssh-add” command.

$ ssh-add /home/myuser/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent

Solution :

This error can be visible when we are working on newly installed Ubuntu and authentication agent is not running, so we have to start the agent using below command,

$ ssh-agent -s

The output of above command on terminal would be as below,

$ ssh-agent -s
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-AxTnx3bEYBhS/agent.78523; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK;
SSH_AGENT_PID=78524; export SSH_AGENT_PID;
echo Agent pid 78524;

Now, if we check that agent is already running as,

$ ps -A | grep 78524
  78524 ?        00:00:00 ssh-agent

Now, if we try to add ssh key again then it will work as,

$ ssh-add /home/myuser/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

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