title: Using putty's pagent with egit in Eclipse
body: <p>I'm trying to access a private remote SSH git repository via the Eclipse 'egit' module.  I'm running Eclipse on Windows. Eclipse doesn't seem to automagically work with putty's pagent for authorization forwarding and I can't find any documentation about customizing the SSH used by egit (e.g., to use plink.exe).</p>
  <p>I've found documentation on the web about setting up other Windows git clients to use putty/plink (e.g., for msysgit), but I can't seem to find anything about Eclipse's egit and putty (or eclipse).</p>
  <p>I'm confident the ssh key works normally, as I use it all the time to log into the server with Putty.</p>
  <p>Specifically, I use the Git Repository Viewer, click 'Clone Remote Repository', fill in the host, repository path, protocol (ssh), and user.  I Click 'Next'.  I can tell that its connecting because I get a pop-up with my server's unique banner.  Then I get a</p>
  <pre><code>Transport Error: Cannot list the available branches: Reason: &lt;URI&gt;: Auth fail
  </code></pre>
  <p>The ssh login is by sshkey only, so that's why this doesn't work (but at least it shows I've got the basics down).</p>
  <p>Anyone have success with egit+pageant?  Or know if its just not possible?</p>
  <h2>Update</h2>
  <p>It seems that this doesn't work because Eclipse has a pure-Java SSH (jsch) implementation internally that it uses, and that implementation Eclipse contains does not (yet) support the authorization agent protocols.</p>
  <p>Some patches to support platform ssh agents via the have been proposed (thanks to @Janning for the link).  See this Eclipse <a href="https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=179924" rel="noreferrer">bug 179924</a>.  Update #24 includes this encouraging note about the proposed patches:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>I have confirmed that I can get accesses to <a href="http://github.com/" rel="noreferrer">http://github.com/</a> and clone
  some projects by egit with putty's pageant.</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>I'm not entirely sure, but it seems like the current hangups are some licensing issues around a pure-java unix-domain socket library, and upgrading the pure-java SSH implementation that Eclipse uses.</p>
  <p>A more recent bug (<a href="https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=360663" rel="noreferrer">number 360663</a>) shows the required version of jsch has been committed to Eclipse (and as far as I can tell should be part of the next release -- should be end of June 2012).</p>