Connecting git to github on windows 7 without bash
- by George Mauer
I'm setting up git on my new Windows 7 machine and I'm hitting a roadblock when it comes to getting github to acknowledge my ssh key. I am doing things a little different from the standard script in that I would rather not use cygwin and prefer to use my powershell prompt. The following is what I did:
I installed msysgit (portable).
I went to C:\program files\git\bin and used ssh-keygen to generate a public/private ssh keypair which I put in c:\Temp
I then created a directory named .ssh\ in c:\Users\myusername\ (on windows 7)
I moved both the files generated by the ssh-keygen (id_rsa and id_rsa.pub) into the .ssh directory
I went to my account on github, created a new public key, copy-pasted the contents of id_rsa.pub into it and saved
I now go to my powershell prompt, set-alias git 'C:\program files\git\bin\git.exe'
I try to now do a clone [email protected]:togakangaroo/ps-profile.git which rejects my authentication:
Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
Past experience says that this means git is not recognizing my key. What steps am I missing?
I have a feeling that I need to somehow configure git so that it knows where my ssh keys are (though it would seem it should look there automatically) but I don't know how to do that.
Another possible clue is that when I try to run git config --global user.name "George Mauer"
I get an error
fatal: $HOME not set
I did however set up a HOME environment user variable with the value %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%