How can I get git and copSSH to look in the correct directory for keys?

Question

I just installed copSSH for Windows. When I boot it up I get a directory C:\copSSH\home\Nick\.ssh which has my pub and private key it.

When I access this directory via a Cygwin bash window using

ssh user@host

I get happily logged in. However, when I open a git bash window with

git clone ssh://user@host

it tries to access the keys in C:\Users\Nick\.ssh, which gives me a "permission denied" error. How can I fix git so everything is using C:\copSSH\home\Nick\.ssh as the directory?

Answer 1

The environment variables set by copSSH are not the same than the one found in a git bash Windows. (see also OpenSSH on Windows)

You may need to redefine the $HOME variable to the one used by copSSH. See this thread for additional example of HOME redefinition.

By default, HOME=/c/Users/Nick.
Try:

 export HOME=/c/copSSH/home/Nick

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To make it permanent (each time you open a bash shell), you can try adding this line to your .bashrc under c:\Users\Nick (c:\Users\Nick\.bashrc)