ssh-agent on macos ~/.zshrc

macos-zshrc-readme.md

What to put in your ~/.zshrc

Brainless ssh-agent code for ZSH (or BASH) on macos

Quickstart

Probably near the top, after the point where the macos ssh-agent -l is running via launchd, but could be anywhere:

~/.zshrc

if ! ssh-add -l > /dev/null; then
    ssh-add
fi

This ^ will call ssh-add and prompt you for your passphrase if, ssh-add -l returns nonzero status (it prints The agent has no identities.)

If ssh-add is storing a key, nothing happens so you WON'T be prompted for your ~/.ssh/id_rsa (ish) passphrase.

Assumptions

• launchd starts ssh-agent magically, by default (does it?):

❯ ps aux | grep -E 'ssh-agent|PID' | grep -v grep
USER               PID  %CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS   TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND
leme               755   0.0  0.0 33626532   1400   ??  S    10:59PM   0:00.04 /usr/bin/ssh-agent -l

Notes

• I removed all the other junk dealing with ssh-agent in my [.zshrc | .bash_profile], rebooted and ran the above ps command to check the baseline
• It's also likely that Gnome or X11/XDM might startup an agent on login, in which case, this is also all you may need