Share SSH keys with VS Code Devcontainer running with Docker's WSL2 backend

Question

I'm reading these docs on sharing SSH keys with a dev container, but I can't get it to work.

My setup is as follows:

• Windows 10 with Docker Desktop 4.2.0 using the WSL2 backend

• A WSL2 distro running Ubuntu 20.04

• In WSL2, I have ssh-agent running and aware of my key:

  λ ssh-add -l
  4096 SHA256:wDqVYQshQBCG/Sri/bsgjEaUFboQDUO/9FJqhFMncdk /home/taschan/.ssh/id_rsa (RSA)
  

The docs say

the extension will automatically forward your local SSH agent if one is running

But if I do ssh-add -l in the devcontainer, it responds with Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.; and of course starting one (with eval "$(ssh-agent -s)") only starts one that doesn't know of my private key.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

I also had quite a lot of trouble to get this to work. The following steps might help troubleshooting:

1. Check that ssh-agent is running on your host and the key is added

   Run ssh-agent -l on Windows and expect to see the name of your key

2. Check that VSCode forwards the socket

   Search ssh-agent in the startup log. I had the message

   ssh-agent: SSH_AUTH_SOCK in container (/tmp/vscode-ssh-auth-a56c4b60c939c778f2998dee2a6bbe12285db2ad.sock) forwarded to local host (\\.\pipe\openssh-ssh-agent).
   

So it seems that VSCode is directly forwarding the Windows SSH agent here (and not an SSH agent running in your WSL).