I have a site as a remote Git repo pulling from Bitbucket.com using an SSH alias. I can manually start the ssh-agent on my server but I have to do this every time I login via SSH.

I manually start the ssh-agent:

eval ssh-agent $SHELL

Then I add the agent:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/bitbucket_id

Then it shows up when I do:

ssh-add -l

And I'm good to go. Is there any way to automate this process so I don't have to do it every time I login? The server is running RedHat 6.2 (Santiago).

Please go through this article. You may find this very useful:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210506080335/https://mah.everybody.org/docs/ssh

Just in case the above link vanishes some day, I am capturing the main piece of the solution below:

This solution from Joseph M. Reagle by way of Daniel Starin:

Add this following to your .bash_profile

SSH_ENV="$HOME/.ssh/agent-environment"
function start_agent {
echo “Initialising new SSH agent…”
/usr/bin/ssh-agent | sed ’s/^echo/#echo/’ > “${SSH_ENV}”
echo succeeded
chmod 600 “${SSH_ENV}”
. “${SSH_ENV}” > /dev/null
/usr/bin/ssh-add;
}
Source SSH settings, if applicable
if [ -f “${SSH_ENV}” ]; then
. “${SSH_ENV}” > /dev/null
#ps ${SSH_AGENT_PID} doesn’t work under cywgin
ps -ef | grep ${SSH_AGENT_PID} | grep ssh-agent$ > /dev/null || {
start_agent;
}
else
start_agent;
fi

This version is especially nice since it will see if you've already started ssh-agent and, if it can't find it, will start it up and store the settings so that they'll be usable the next time you start up a shell.