Windows 10 OpenSSH: Migrating from PuTTy: Installation

This article is the first of a series I’ve written about migrating from using PuTTy on Windows to using the native OpenSSH client now available on Windows 10: you can read the rest of the articles via:

1. Installation < You are here
2. Storing keys using the SSH Agent
3. Importing existing keys
4. Creating a new public/private key pair
5. Other useful OpenSSH commands
6. Configuring Windows Git

I’ve been a very very long time use of the excellent PuTTy SSH tools (since at least version 0.52 in 2002: at the time of writing, release 0.72 came out on the 20th of July 2019), but Windows 10 v1809 (also known as the Windows 10 April 2018 update), Microsoft finally added SSH support directly to Windows.

Whilst Microsoft does have a guide on their website about installing OpenSSH on Windows 10, it mixes setting up the OpenSSH client (which most people will want) with the OpenSSH server (which most people do not want) and it doesn’t give a guide on moving/migrating from PuTTy, so here’s the start of my guide!

Installation via PowerShell

1. Open PowerShell as administrator:
2. Install openSSH client:
   Add-WindowsCapability -Online -Name OpenSSH.Client~~~~0.0.1.0
   You should get output such as:

   Path          :
   Online        : True
   RestartNeeded : False
   

You will now have ssh, ssh-keygen, ssh-agent, ssh-add, ssh-keyscan, sftp and scp available!

The next step is setting up the ssh agent to store the keys