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weasel-pageant development has ended

End of life notice: Native support for Unix domain sockets appeared over two years ago in Windows 10 1803. At this point it no longer makes sense to maintain weasel-pageant, which relies on the older pipe-based and bug-prone WSL-Win32 interop method. Therefore, with the exception of critical security patches, support for weasel-pageant will cease on April 14, 2020; this date is also the EOL for Windows 10 1709, the last desktop edition of Windows without support for Unix domain sockets.

Users are advised to migrate to more modern equivalents. I use WinCryptSSHAgent, which offers convenient support for PIV smartcard certificates and also promises WSL2/Hyper-V support in the latest version. wsl-ssh-pageant appears to offer a more traditional alternative for Pageant users, but I have not tested it myself.

Update, Apr 14 2020: The EOL date has arrived and hence the issue tracker will be closed. Extended support for security issues continues until June 14, 2020.

Update, Jun 15 2020: Final end of support date has passed. No further changes will be accepted.

All users are advised to upgrade to a supported alternative as soon as possible.

Thanks to all the users over the years and happy SSH'ing.

weasel-pageant allows you to use SSH keys held by PuTTY's Pageant "daemon" (or compatible, such as the version of Pageant included in PuTTY-CAC or the SSH agent mode in Gpg4win) from inside the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

The source (and this documentation) is heavily based on ssh-pageant 1.4 by Josh Stone, which allows interacting with Pageant from Cygwin/MSYS programs.

weasel-pageant works like ssh-agent, except that it leaves the key storage to PuTTY's Pageant. It sets up an authentication socket and prints the environment variables, which allows the OpenSSH client to use it. It works by executing from the WSL side a Win32 helper program which interfaces with Pageant and communicating with it through pipes.

It is probably the most useful if your SSH keys can't be copied to the WSL environment, such as when using a smart card for SSH authentication. Testing is mainly performed with Pageant-CAC, though Gpg4win has been seen to work in the past. Note that when using Gpg4win, only the SSH agent part will be forwarded. There is no support for forwarding the GPG agent socket.

SECURITY NOTICE: All the usual security caveats applicable to WSL apply. Most importantly, all interaction with the Win32 world happens with the credentials of the user who started the WSL environment. In practice, if you allow someone else to log in to your WSL environment remotely, they may be able to access the SSH keys stored in your Pageant with weasel-pageant. This is a fundamental feature of WSL; if you are not sure of what you're doing, do not allow remote access to your WSL environment (e.g. by starting an SSH server).

weasel-pageant does not work on a version of Windows 10 older than 1703 ("Creators Update"), because it requires the Windows/Ubuntu interoperability support feature shipped with that version. It has been verified to work with versions up to and including Windows 10 release 1909.

Installation

From binaries

Download the zip file from the releases page and unpack it in a convenient location on the Windows part of your drive.

Because WSL can only execute Win32 binaries from drvfs locations, weasel-pageant will not work if unpacked inside the WSL filesystem (onto an lxfs mount). Advanced users may place only helper.exe on drvfs, but in general it is easier to keep the pieces together.

From source

A VS2019 project is included. You will need the "Desktop development with C++" and "Linux development with C++" features. To build:

  1. Optional: In Visual Studio, set up an SSH connection to a Linux machine. If you want to build using your local WSL environment, the default configuration should work.

  2. Optional: If you intend to work on the Linux sources, copy the contents of /usr/include into linux/include under the project directory. This is not required for the build, but will make Intellisense more useful.

  3. Hit Build Solution. Both the Linux executable and the Win32 helper will be built.

If you want to create a binary package, you can use the create_pkg.py script at the root of the project. This should work with Python 3.4 or newer on either Windows or Linux.

Alternatively you can build the Linux executable directly on Linux and only use Visual Studio for the Win32 helper (no Makefile or similar is supplied at the moment). In theory the helper should be buildable with MinGW-w64 for a fully Linux-based build, but this has not been tested.

The release binaries have been built with VS2019 16.2.0.

Usage

Using weasel-pageant is generally similar to using ssh-agent on Linux and similar operating systems.

  1. Ensure that PuTTY's Pageant is running (and holds your SSH keys).

    • weasel-pageant does not start Pageant itself.
    • Recommended: Add Pageant to your Windows startup/Autostart configuration so it is always available.

  2. Edit your ~/.bashrc (or ~/.bash_profile) to add the following:

     eval $(<location where you unpacked the zip>/weasel-pageant -r)

    To explain:

    • This leverages the -r/--reuse option which will only start a new daemon if one is not already running in the current window. If the agent socket appears to be active, it will just print environment variables and exit.

    • Using eval will set the environment variables in the current shell. By default, weasel-pageant tries to detect the current shell and output appropriate commands. If detection fails, then use the -S SHELL option to define a shell type manually.

  3. Restart your shell or type (when using bash) . ~/.bashrc. Typing ssh-add -l should now list the keys you have registered in Pageant.

Note regarding the -a flag

A previous version of this manual suggested using the -a flag to set a fixed socket path which could be reused by all open WSL consoles. Due to the limitations of WSL-Win32 interop, this causes problems including hanging SSH agent connections and hanging conhost processes in many use cases. Unless you have a specific need for a fixed socket path, it is better to remove the -a flag froom your weasel-pageant startup command. A weasel-pageant instance will then be started for each WSL console you open.

However, with Windows 10 version 1809 or newer, it is now possible to use a fixed socket path reliably. In addition to the -a flag, also set the -b to prevent the weasel-pageant process from exiting with its parent console. For example to create a persistent socket in your home directory:

eval $(<location where you unpacked the zip>/weasel-pageant -rb -a $HOME/.weasel-pageant.sock)

Options

weasel-pageant aims to be compatible with ssh-agent options, with a few extras:

$ weasel-pageant -h
Usage: weasel-pageant [options] [command [arg ...]]
Options:
  -h, --help     Show this help.
  -v, --version  Display version information.
  -c             Generate C-shell commands on stdout.
  -s             Generate Bourne shell commands on stdout.
  -S SHELL       Generate shell command for "bourne", "csh", or "fish".
  -k             Kill the current weasel-pageant.
  -d             Enable debug mode.
  -q             Enable quiet mode.
  -a SOCKET      Create socket on a specific path.
  -r, --reuse    Allow to reuse an existing -a SOCKET.
  -H, --helper   Path to the Win32 helper binary (default: /mnt/c/Program Files/weasel-pageant/helper.exe).
  -t TIME        Limit key lifetime in seconds (not supported by Pageant).
  -b             Do not exit when tty closes (only use on Windows 10 version 1809 and newer).

By default, the Win32 helper will be searched for in the same directory where weasel-pageant is installed. If you have placed helper.exe elsewhere, the -H flag can be used to set the location.

Known issues

Uninstallation

To uninstall, just remove the extracted files and any modifications you made to your shell initialization files (e.g. .bashrc).

Version History

Bug reports and contributions

Bug reports may be sent using Github's issues feature. Include your weasel-pageant version and command line, describe how to reproduce the problem, and include logs from running in debug mode if possible: run weasel-pageant with the -d flag in either subprocess mode or in a separate terminal in daemon mode (copy/paste the environment variables to your main terminal).

Please do not send bug reports by e-mail.

Pull requests are also welcome, though if you intend to do major changes it's recommended to open an issue first.

Related projects

There are several projects that provide similar functionality (I have not tested all of these):

Copyright 2017-2019 Valtteri Vuorikoski & contributors

Based on ssh-pageant, copyright (C) 2009-2014 Josh Stone

Licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 or later, http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

See the COPYING file for license details.
Part of weasel-pageant is derived from the PuTTY program, whose original license is in the file COPYING.PuTTY.