Can I test authentication with an RSA key locally?

Question

Is there a way to check locally if you\'re providing the correct passphrase to an RSA key?

I recently had trouble pushing some commits to github because the push prompte

Answer 1

Or as pointed here: How can I test my ssh-keys locally without a server

You can do this:

ssh-keygen -y

And this doesn't require any server (works great with msysgit on Windows).

Answer 2

You can run ssh-add to add your key to your current ssh-agent. This will prompt for your passphrase.

Normally, when ssh-agent is running, and you add a key to it, you won't have to unlock your key any more when you connect to hosts that recognise that key. If that isn't what you want, just run ssh-add -d to remove it off your ssh-agent when you're done testing.