AddSSHkeys — Add Keys to SSH Agent

Version: 0.5

Released: 2023-04-20

AddSSHkeys adds all of your keys to SSH Agent in one operation. It is helpful if you routinely add more than one key to your agent. It can work with Avendesora to keep your passphrases secure.

Please report all bugs and suggestions to addsshkeys@nurdletech.com

Getting Started

Download and install AddSSHkeys with:

pip install addsshkeys

Once installed, you will need at least one configuration file. Configurations are placed in: ~/.config/addsshkeys. They are NestedText files. The default configuration is config; the default file is config.nt.

The following settings may be given in your config files.

ssh_add

The name of the command that adds keys to your SSH agent. By default, ‘ssh-add’ is used.

ssh_keys

This setting is required. It contains a dictionary of dictionaries that contains information about each key. The primary dictionary contains a name and the values for each key. The values are held in a dictionary that may contain three fields:

paths

This is required and contains the paths to one or more SSH private key files. It may be a list of strings, or a single string that is split. If a relative path is given, it is relative to ~/.ssh.

account

This gives the name of the Avendesora account that holds passphrase for the keys. If present, Avendesora will be queried for the passphrase.

passphrase

This is required if account is not given, otherwise it is optional. If account is given, it is the name of the passphrase field in Avendesora, which defaults to ‘passcode’. If account is not given, it is the passphrase itself. In this case, the settings file should only be readable by the user.

config_file_mask

An integer that determines if a warning should be printed about the config file permissions being too loose. The permissions are only checked if the file is found to contain a passphrase. Default is 077. Set to 000 to disable the warning. Set to 077 to generate a warning if the configuration directory is readable or writable by the group or others. Set to 007 to generated a warning if the directory is readable or writable by others.

auth_sock_path

If given, the value of $SSH_AUTH_SOCKET is written to the specified path. This can be useful when running SSH related commands in cron and anacron scripts.

Here is an example configuration file:

ssh_keys:
    primary:
        paths: primary-ed25519 primary-rsa
        account: primary-ssh-key
    digitalocean:
        paths: digitalocean
        account: digitalocean-ssh-key
    github:
        paths: github
        passphrase: canard apply trousseau forgive
    backups:
        paths: dumper
        account: dumper-ssh-key

# assure config file is only readable by me
config_file_mask: 077

# used to provide path to SSH authorization socket to scripts run by cron
auth_sock_path: ~/.ssh/auth-sock

Underscores can be replaced by spaces in all keys.

Running AddSSHkeys

Once configured, you can run AddSSHkeys with the default configuration using:

addsshkeys

And you can run it with a particular configuration using:

addsshkeys <config>

where <config> is the name of the configuration you wish to use (no need to give the .nt suffix). In this way you can have several bundles of keys that you can load as needed.

Releases

Latest Development Version:

Version: 0.5

Released: 2023-04-20

0.5 (2023-04-20)

• added auth_sock_path.

0.4 (2020-10-19)

• fix config_file_mask.

0.3 (2020-10-19)

• allow config file to end with .nt suffix.

0.2 (2020-10-14)

• update to latest version of NestedText

0.1 (2020-08-31)

• convert to NestedText for settings file.