Adding your SSH key to the ssh-agent

Before adding a new SSH key to the ssh-agent to manage your keys, you should have checked for existing SSH keys and generated a new SSH key.
Doing this weakens the security, but only if someone has access to your account or your system has already been compromised.
SSH-AGENT is not a daemon and must be started upon each login which will ask for the passphrase. You *could* NOHUP the command so it stays active between reboots. But I'd avoid doing this.

Start the ssh-agent in the background.

$ eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
> Agent pid 59566

Add your SSH private key to the ssh-agent. If you created your key with a different name, or if you are adding an existing key that has a different name, replace id_rsa in the command with the name of your private key file.

$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa