How-To: Access GitHub with EZSSH

If your organization uses SSH Certificates to protect your GitHub organization, you must use the EZSSH client to request certificates and get just-in-time access to your code.

Tip

If you are having trouble authenticating to your git repository, make sure to check out our Troubleshooting git problems guide

Prerequisites

Download EZSSH

Tenant Prerequisites

Your tenant admin/GitHub admins must connect EZSSH to GitHub Enterprise before users are able to login to Git using EZSSH.

Video Version

Usage

Go to your favorite terminal, and enter:

ezssh git

The first time it will ask you to login with your Azure Active Directory Account
You should get a “GitHub identity created successfully” message
Start using your favorite Git Tool for committing your code!

Note

EZSSH Git certificates are short lived (based on your organizations settings might last between 1 and 72 hours). You will have to run this command each time the certificate is expired.

Sending a command through EZSSH

EZSSH offers the option of sending a command to your git solution to make it easier to use. Just add a -c and the command to your EZSSH git command. For Example if you want to pull you can do:

ezssh git -c "pull"

EZSSH will talk care of using your existing certificate or getting a new one and then will call git pull in another window. EZSSH Agentless JIT Access terminal running ezssh git pull command with git output showing Already up to date

How to Auto-run `ezssh git` on Every Git Command

If you would rather not run ezssh git manually each time your certificate expires, you can have git itself call ezssh git before every SSH connection. This works on macOS, Linux, and WSL.

Create a wrapper script at ~/.config/git/ezssh-git-wrapped.sh (the path can vary) with the following contents:
```
#!/bin/sh
ezssh git > /dev/null
exec ssh "$@"
```

Make the script executable:

chmod +x ~/.config/git/ezssh-git-wrapped.sh

Point git at the wrapper by adding this to your ~/.gitconfig:

[core]
    sshCommand = ~/.config/git/ezssh-git-wrapped.sh