Annoying ssh workflow

Question

I've been using ssh for svn for a while now, but suddenly this strange thing happen

First, running svn up would just do, wonderfully.

Later, running svn up prompted me for a password, the suggested solution was to do sudo ssh-add ~/.ssh/* and then executing the update. Not very painful, but not so fun either.

Now, even that won't work. It says:

Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.

So the actual way of making this work is:

exec ssh-agent bash

sudo ssh-add ~/.ssh/*

svn up

Is there a way I can avoid doing all that stuff ?

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

Just put this line into your .profile:

eval `ssh-agent -s`

And it'll be taken care of automatically whenever you open a shell.

You could put the ssh-add command in there too, but I recommend doing that manually so that you can keep your private key passphrase-encrypted.

Answer 2

You can also run svn through apache. That way you will only need to do the ssh-agent/ssh-add prior to starting apache.

You can then access svn through https.