Make IntelliJ IDEA use public key authentication on Windows

Question

I'm an Eclipse user who's evaluating a switch to IntelliJ IDEA. I'm currently trying out IDEA 10.0.2. My operating system is Windows.

When working with Git over SSH, IDEA always asks me for password. I can't find any option in the settings to make it use public key authentication. As per this post, my key is in the %USERPROFILE%\.ssh directory and my HOME variable points to the same directory as USERPROFILE.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong and Googling for more details hasn't produced any results. Does anyone have any idea how to make IDEA use public key authentication?

EDIT: My key is password-protected.

Answer 1

If your command line git uses public key auth, the same should work from IDEA. In the IDEA VCS settings switch SSH implementation from IDEA ssh to native so that the same SSH is used as when running command line git.

Answer 2

In the latest version [as of April 29th, 2019], there is no option for SSH executable to switch SSH implementation. So, I followed the following steps on Windows 10:

1. Create an ssh-keypair (it can be created on Linux and copied onto windows machine)
2. Copy public SSH key contents to GitHub Settings -> SSH and GPG keys -> New SSH key
3. Copy private key to C:\Users\<your-user-name>\.ssh\