One way to simplify the URL in TortoiseSVN is to set the user inside the PuTTY session. For this you have to load your already defined session SvnConnection in PuTTY and in the Connection tab set Auto login user to the user name, e.g. svnuser. Save your PuTTY session as before and try the following URL inside TortoiseSVN:

svn+ssh://SvnConnection/repos

This time we only provide the PuTTY session SvnConnection to the SSH client TortoiseSVN uses (TortoisePlink.exe). This client will check the session for all necessary details.

At the time of writing PuTTY does not check all saved configurations, so if you have multiple configurations with the same server name, it will pick the first one which matches. Also, if you edit the default configuration and save it, the auto login user name is not saved.

Many people like to use Pageant for storing all their keys. Because a PuTTY session is capable of storing a key, you don't always need Pageant. But imagine you want to store keys for several different servers; in that case you would have to edit the PuTTY session over and over again, depending on the server you are trying to connect with. In this situation Pageant makes perfect sense, because when PuTTY, Plink, TortoisePlink or any other PuTTY-based tool is trying to connect to an SSH server, it checks all private keys that Pageant holds to initiate the connection.

For this task, simply run Pageant and add the private key. It should be the same private key you defined in the PuTTY session above. If you use Pageant for private key storage, you can delete the reference to the private key file in your saved PuTTY session. You can add more keys for other servers, or other users of course.

If you don't want to repeat this procedure after every reboot of your client, you should place Pageant in the auto-start group of your Windows installation. You can append the keys with complete paths as command line arguments to Pageant.exe

The last way to connect to an SSH server is simply by using this URL inside TortoiseSVN:

svn+ssh://[email protected]/repos
svn+ssh://[email protected]/repos

As you can see, we don't use a saved PuTTY session but an IP address (or domain name) as the connection target. We also supply the user, but you might ask how the private key file will be found. Because TortoisePlink.exe is just a modified version of the standard Plink tool from the PuTTY suite, TortoiseSVN will also try all the keys stored in Pageant.

If you use this last method, be sure you do not have a default username set in PuTTY. We have had reports of a bug in PuTTY causing connections to close in this case. To remove the default user, simply clear HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\Putty\Sessions\Default%20Settings\HostName