Question

troubleshooting SSH agent forwarding with doctl compute ssh <droplet-id> --ssh-agent-forwarding

Posted on January 29, 2025
DigitalOcean API and CLI (doctl)DigitalOcean Droplets
Asked by David Ventimiglia

Hello! I’m having trouble getting doctl compute ssh <droplet-id> --ssh-agent-forwarding to work. I’m trying to forward my connection from my local ssh-agent to a droplet, so that I can use my GitHub credentials on that droplet, but it doesn’t succeed. If I try plain old SSH with ssh -A root@<droplet-ip-address> then it works fine. What sorts of things could contribute to this problem? Thanks! P.S. Here’s a screencast illustrating it:

https://asciinema.org/a/R7a4S3w7dd3qfeL4unpSPw6ik

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• February 2, 2025

Hey David!

First off, that asciinema is awesome! Super helpful for understanding the issue!

I think that, since SSH agent forwarding works fine with ssh -A but not with doctl compute ssh --ssh-agent-forwarding, this looks like it might be a bug in doctl rather than a misconfiguration on your end.

I’d recommend opening an issue on the doctl GitHub repo so the DigitalOcean team can investigate: 🔗 https://github.com/digitalocean/doctl/issues/

Make sure to include the asciinema video in the issue as well! Once you submit the issue, feel free to share it here as well and I can try to forward it internally!

- Bobby