Using SSH Keys from KeePassXC in WSL

In this post, I briefly want to show a way to use SSH keys managed by KeePassXC also in WSL.

I setup SSH key management via KeePassXC on my Windows machine some time ago. It works really well for me: Whenever I unlock my KeePass database, my SSH key becomes available and I can pull and push to Git.

However, this only works under Windows. In WSL, the key is not available since WSL uses completely separate versions of git and ssh that do not interact with their Windows counterparts. This was not a problem for me earlier since I mainly used WSL for Docker. However, more recently I also wanted to work with some Git repositories in WSL, so this became a problem.

Turns out the solution is quite simple:

# Run this in WSL
git config --global core.sshcommand "ssh.exe"

This instructs Git under WSL to use the Windows SSH executable. Counterintuitively, this actually works since WSL can run Windows executables (and your Windows SSH executable is already configured to use the SSH keys from KeePass).

With this, you can use the SSH keys from KeePass also in WSL without additional friction!

Note: This article was originally written during my employment at TNG and is republished here with permission. The opinions are my own and TNG does not endorse this publication.