Unlock keyring on ssh use

Ask Fedora
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1

I have my ssh key passphrase stored in the gnome keyring, but when I ssh to a host for the first time I get a GUI prompt for the ssh passphrase not the keyring password.

I can manually go and unlock the keying before first use of ssh, but it’s a bit annoying. Is there a way to change this behaviour?

2

This is what I do on KDE, I assume you can do the same on Gnome.

I add a startup-task that runs a script that loads my SSH keys (I have move then 1).
The short version of that script is:

#!/bin/bash
# always have the SSH keys loaded
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 </dev/null

You may need to set SSH_ASKPASS=/usr/bin/ksshaskpass. I do that with these lines in
my .bash_profile.

if [ -e "${SSH_ASKPASS:=/usr/bin/ksshaskpass}" ]
then
    export GIT_ASKPASS=${SSH_ASKPASS}
    export SSH_ASKPASS
fi

Having set that all up, logout then log back in.

The first time you will see a GUI prompt for the ssh id passphrase/.
It will be stored in the keyring and used automatically the next time you login.

4

I’d already set a blank password in Seahorse, but that seems to not be sufficient.

After some more digging around I’ve found I can issue the unlock command to the keyring as follows

echo | gnome-keyring-daemon --replace --unlock --daemonize

So I’m thinking to create a systemd service to run that on login. I dunno, feels maybe there should be an easier way?