SSH Agent Forwarding not working with Remote SSH on MacOS (still a problem)

The title is the same as microsoft/vscode-remote-release#2671 because I’m having precisely the same problem, and that issue was closed without a resolution. In short, ssh agent forwarding does not work in VSCode, despite working just fine when I SSH in via the terminal. It seems to be due to a stale / cached SSH_AUTH_SOCK.

The workaround suggested in microsoft/vscode-remote-release#2671 no longer works, but a minor modification does it for me. See below.

VSCode Version:

Version: 1.53.2
Commit: 622cb03f7e070a9670c94bae1a45d78d7181fbd4
Date: 2021-02-11T11:45:54.515Z
Electron: 11.2.1
Chrome: 87.0.4280.141
Node.js: 12.18.3
V8: 8.7.220.31-electron.0

OS: Darwin 20.6.0 Local OS Version: MacOS 11.6.1 Remote OS Version: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster) (GNU/Linux 4.19.0-18-cloud-amd64 x86_64) Remote Extension/Connection Type: SSH Steps to Reproduce:

1. set up ssh config with a host you want to forward your ssh agent keys to and set ‘ForwardAgent yes’
2. Connect via terminal ssh and perform an operation requiring your forwarded key (in my case, ssh -T [e-mail])
3. launch VSCode and validate that $SSH_AUTH_SOCK is set
4. Connect via Remote-SSH, then use the VSCode terminal to run ssh -T [e-mail]. This time, I receive a permission denied error.

Does this issue occur when you try this locally?: NA Does this issue occur when you try this locally and all extensions are disabled?: NA

Possible cause

The environment variable SSH_AUTH_SOCK appears to be stale. A workaround is to run

export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$(ls -t /tmp/ssh-**/* | head -1)

which sets the socket to the newest one. Note that this workaround is quite fragile, as I had to modify the previous workaround to make it work now.

[davibe]

Same issue here, closing and recreating the terminal fixes it, but terminals cerated when vscode starts have a stale SSH_AUTH_SOCK

[meganrogge]

Yeah the env var info widgets never appear for me in WSL