Pushing to GitHub without a password

January 21, 2026

Configure SSH on the local computer, generate a new SSH key if needed, and add the public key to the GitHub account.

The “trick” for using the key to push to a repo is that the repo’s remote on the local computer needs to be set to the SSH URL, not the HTTPS URL. Assuming the URL is currently set to an HTTPS URL, for example:

❯ git remote -v
origin  https://github.com/scossar/zalgorithm_theme (fetch)
origin  https://github.com/scossar/zalgorithm_theme (push)

updated it with:

❯ git remote set-url origin git@github.com:scossar/zalgorithm_theme.git

The pattern for the SSH URL is:

git@github.com:OWNER/REPOSITORY.git

Tags:

coding
git