Now that our keys are generated, the last thing we need to do is start up the SSH agent and add this key so it knows that it exists. We'll do this by running two commands. These are:

• eval
• ssh-add

First up we'll run eval, and then we'll open some quotes and inside the quotes, we'll use the dollar sign and open and close some parentheses just like this:

eval "$()"

Inside our parentheses we'll type ssh-agent with the s flag:

eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"

This will start up the SSH agent program and it will also print the process ID to confirm it is indeed running, and as shown, we get Agent pid 1116:

The process ID is obviously going to be different for everyone. As long as you get something back like this you are good to go.

Next up we have to tell the SSH agent where this file lives. We'll do that using ssh-add. This takes the path to our private key file which we have in the user directory /.ssh/id_rsa:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

When I run this, I should get a message like identity added:

This means that the local machine now knows about this public/private key pair and it'll try to use these credentials when it communicates with a third-party service such as GitHub. Now that we have this in place, we are ready to configure GitHub. We'll make an account, set it up, and then we'll come back and test that things are working as expected.