ssh-agent and crontab -- is there a good way to get these to meet?
I wrote a simple script which mails out svn activity logs nightly to our developers. Until now, I've run it on the same machine as the svn repository, so I didn't have to worry about authentication, I could just use svn's file:/// address style.
Now I'm running the script on a home computer, accessing a remote repository, so I had to change to svn+ssh:// paths. With ssh-key nicely set up, I don't ever have to enter passwords for accessing the svn repository under normal circumstances.
However, crontab did not have access to my ssh-keys / ssh-agent. I've read about this problem a few places on the web, and it's also alluded to here, without resolution:
Why ssh fails from crontab but succedes when executed from a command line?
My solution was to add this to the top of the script:
### TOTAL HACK TO MAKE SSH-KEYS WORK ###
eval `ssh-agent -s`
This seems to work under MacOSX 10.6.
My question is, how terrible is this, and is there a better way?
Answer
In addition...
If your key have a passhphrase, keychain will ask you once (valid until you reboot the machine or kill the ssh-agent).
keychain is what you need! Just install it and add the follow code in your .bash_profile:
keychain ~/.ssh/id_dsa
So use the code below in your script to load the ssh-agent environment variables:
. ~/.keychain/$HOSTNAME-sh
Note: keychain also generates code to csh and fish shells.
Copied answer from https://serverfault.com/questions/92683/execute-rsync-command-over-ssh-with-an-ssh-agent-via-crontab