Monday, July 22, 2013

How to Convert OpenSSH Keys to PUTTY

I've just re-installed my development machine and realized I need to import my keys for using with git on Windows.
There's a known issue with OpenSSH being quite slow on Windows, so I opted for using putty instead.

The issue - my keys were generated for OpenSSH, so I needed to somehow convert all my keys to putty ones.
Turns out - it's fairly easy:

  1. Launch puttygen.exe (If you're using Git Extenstions, you can find it in \Program Files\GitExtensions\PuTTY or \Program Files (x86)\GitExtensions\PuTTY)
  2. Press Load and locate your OpenSSH private key file (the first one is usually named "id_rsa".
  3. Then simply click Save and choose the same name with a ppk entension. In this example - id_rsa.ppk.
  4. Repeat for all other keys - if you have them.

That's about it. Git for Windows (msysgit) will now work with putty - and will do it much faster.

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