Wednesday, May 11, 2011

SvnX on OS X 10.6? You Need a Key Pair

A few members of our art team use a mix of the command line and SvnX to move art asset packs around via SVN.

One minor hitch: SvnX can't log into a server that uses svn+ssh as its access method if ssh requires a manually typed password.

The work-around is to establish a private/public key pair for ssh. Once you do that, keychain will offer to store the password, and SvnX can function normally.

In theory sshkeychain should let the key chain remember plain passwords, but I couldn't get this to work on 10.6.

The keypair can be established as follows:

cd ~/.ssh
ssh-keygen -t rsa
(type desired password, accept default file name)
scp id_rsa.pub you@server.com:/home/you/.ssh/auhorized_keys
(where "you" is your unix login name. authorized_keys may need a different name for different servers.)

1 comment:

  1. Instead of using scp to copy the public key into place, use

    ssh you@yourserver.com 'cat - >> .ssh/authorized_keys' < id_rsa.pub

    so you don't inadvertently overwrite existing public keys on the remote machine.

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