SSH Key Auth to GitHub on Win 10 w/ VSCode

My work computer has been using SSH keys to authenticate to GitHub for a while. But I’ve slept a few nights since I set that up and I have no clear memory of what I did.

I wanted to setup my home computer the the same way and struggled to figure out how to do it. So, I thought it might be worth documenting.

The secret (I think) … install git 2.20.0 or higher

In the end, the final change that made SSH key authentication work was updating my git installation from version 2.15.0 to 2.25.0. My work computer has 2.20.0 on it, so I figure that should be the minimum level.

Here’s an outline of the things I tried and notes about them:

	Work Computer	Home Computer	Notes
git (version)	2.20.0	2.15.0 –> 2.25.0	Didn’t work with 2.15.0. Finally worked with 2.25.0.
SSH keys	I don’t remember how I generated them. I think I generated the keys using ubuntu WSL.	Copied them from my work computer to my home computer using normal NTFS system (didn’t need Git Bash, WSL, or any of those). I did register the keys using ssh-add in `Git Bash`, ‘wsl’, and using the Windows 10 ssh-add (see Notes). But, in the end, I turned off Win10’s ssh-agent service and the SSH keys continued to be used for authentication.	On my current version of Win 10, you can start an ssh-agent service in windows. Which means you don’t need to to use a bash command prompt to execute `ssh-keygen` or `ssh-add` commands. Reminder: use `ssh-add –l` to list already registered keys.
Github PAT	I never created one for this machine.	I created one for this machine, and it would work for an individual commit (username: normal github account name, password: PAT)	I don’t think this is needed.