SSH Key - Still asking for password and passphrase

Add Identity without Keychain

There may be times in which you don't want the passphrase stored in the keychain, but don't want to have to enter the passphrase over and over again.

You can do that like this:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa 

This will ask you for the passphrase, enter it and it will not ask again until you restart.

Add Identity Using Keychain

As @dennis points out in the comments, to persist the passphrase through restarts by storing it in your keychain, you can use the -K option (-k for Ubuntu) when adding the identity like this:

ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Once again, this will ask you for the passphrase, enter it and this time it will never ask again for this identity.

If you work with HTTPs urls, it'll always ask for your username / password.

If you're correctly using SSH when cloning / setting remotes. Then make sure you have a ssh-agent to remember your password. That way, you'll only enter your passphrase once by terminal session.

If it is still too annoying, then simply set a ssh-key without passphrase.

On Mac OSX you can add your private key to the keychain using the command:

ssh-add -K /path/to/private_key

If your private key is stored at ~/.ssh and is named id_rsa:

ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_rsa

You will then be prompted for your password, which will be stored in your keychain.

Edit - Handle restart

In order to not have to fill in your password even after a restart add the following to your ssh configuration file (commonly located at ~/.ssh/config)

Host *
  UseKeychain yes
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

I tried all the answers here and none of these answers worked! My password would not persist between sessions/restarts of my Mac.

What I found out from reading this OpenRadar and this Twitter discussion was that Apple purposely changed the behaviour for ssh-agent in macOS 10.12 Sierra to no longer automatically load the previous SSH keys. In order to maintain the same behaviour as El Cap I did the following:

1. ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_rsa
   Note: change the path to where your id_rsa key is located.
2. ssh-add -A

3. Create (or edit if it exists) the following ~/.ssh/config file:

   Host *
     UseKeychain yes
     AddKeysToAgent yes
     IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
   

And now my password is remembered between restarts of my Mac!