oh, karlo

Git, [for] Windows, and SSH

2 min read

To my astonishment, I spent almost 2 hours solving this. I have Git for Windows from scoop and moved to using ssh for Git since CredentialHelper selector keeps popping up whenever I interact with the remote and won’t remember the “Always use this from now on” setting (why put it if it doesn’t work?)

So the key gets loaded in ssh-agent but git won’t fetch it. Then I find out that Git for Windows bundles it’s own ssh binary! For context, Windows has included OpenSSH since Windows 10 1803.[1] What a waste of time. Thanks, Stack Overflow.

So run this:

 git config --global core.sshCommand C:/Windows/System32/OpenSSH/ssh.exe

Update (12 June 2025):

It started working somehow.

Ran

git credential-manager configure
git credential-manager diagnose

And credential.helper suddenly pointed to the absolute path of git-credential-manager.

git config --global credential.helper manager
# warning: credential.helper has multiple values
# error: cannot overwrite multiple values with a single value
#       Use a regexp, --add or --replace-all to change credential.helper.
git config --global credential.helper
# C:/ProgramData/scoop/apps/git/2.47.1.2/mingw64/bin/git-credential-manager.exe

I changed it to point to scoop git’s current symlink.

.gitconfig

[credential]
    helper =  C:/ProgramData/scoop/apps/git/current/mingw64/bin/git-credential-manager.exe

Update 2 (8 August 2025):

Apparently running git credential-manager configure changes the credential section to

[credential]
    helper = manager
    helper =
    helper = C:/ProgramData/scoop/apps/git/2.49.0/mingw64/bin/git-credential-manager.exe

And it will not work otherwise.

I still don’t understand how this works.

  1. Durr, Yosef (7 March 2018). “What’s new for the Command Line in Windows 10 version 1803”. Windows Command Line Tools For Developers.
  2. “How to run ssh-add on Windows?” Stack Overflow.
  3. “Git does not use SSH key (Windows).” Stack Overflow.

Graph View