# Tip O' the day : SSH on Windows

> Learn the simple trick to configure `ssh-agent` and `ssh-add` on Windows with Cygwin, solving SSH passphrase issues for good.

Author: [Guillaume Laforge](https://glaforge.dev/) | Published: 2004-05-07 | Topics: geek, tips, ssh | Canonical: https://glaforge.dev/posts/2004/05/07/tip-o-the-day-ssh-on-windows/


My fellow readers might remember my problems with SSH which have often bothered me. I faced again a similar issue:

I wanted to upload a new Groovy snapshot Jar, before we release RC-1 next week. As a Groovy despot, with the help of some wonderful hausmates (particularly Trygve and Bob) I managed to authenticate myself with ssh-agent + ssh-add on the Codehaus server, so that maven doesn't require me to enter my passphrase for my key.

For the record, I'm using Cygwin on a windows XP box, with OpenSSH installed.

Here is the trick, in a cygwin-bash terminal type:

```
eval `ssh-agent`
ssh-add
maven -Dmaven.username=xxxx yourGoal
```

And I was done...