Reduce the pain of consuming SSH remotes

There’s a collection of issues spread across multiple issues which touch on situations involving SSH remotes:

• a user isn’t clear on how to setup their machine to consume SSH repositories: #2453 #2847

I looked around, and I cannot see anywhere, either in the desktop app settings, nor in the settings for any repository, nor in my GitHub profile settings, where I would go about doing SSH remote configuration.

• cloning a repo via SSH (and not defaulting back to https) - #2085

• setting up an SSH key and registering it on GitHub on behalf of a user - #2577

• a repository with SSH submodules cannot be cloned because of a vague authentication failure: #2344 #2338

• an SSH private may be protected with a passphrase - this can be handled by ssh-agent or PuTTY #2859

• No way to trust unknown host keys - #3457

• Using plink causes pushes to hang - #8765

• No option for a default protocol (https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/11885)

• No support for hardware keys (https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/12216)

• Desktop does not use OpenSSH on Windows if running, favours embedded SSH (#5641)

The classic apps addressed some of this (at least on the Windows side):

• creating a new SSH key if not found and adding it to GitHub
• ensuring ssh-agent was running when launching the app or Git Shell
• setting the right environment variables when performing Git operations

[pboling]

Every time I setup a new machine I download Github Desktop, hoping this bug will have been fixed. Every time I discover that it has not been, throw it away, and vow to check back in a few months.

The app is nigh useless with an unchangeable default setting of HTTPS rather than git with SSH. Life is annoying enough already.

How is this not a configurable option?

[thenetimp]

Better error messages would be nice. For example on MacOS High Sierra if you don’t use ssh-add to add your key because you are using a passphrase on your ssh key then github desktop throws a generic message of

“Authentication failed. You may not have permission to access the repository or the repository may have been archived. Open preferences and verify that you’re signed in with an account that has permission to access this repository.”

If this message had been more specific, it wouldn’t have taken me 30 minutes to figure out what was going on…