This tutorial describes how to start an SSH terminal session under Windows, open the connection from the KeePass Manager, the known password Safe, with using OpenSSH and the Windows Terminal. Prerequisite is that OpenSSH is installed on Windows, from Apps & Features – Optional Features. The Windows Terminal can be found in the Microsoft Store.

The new Windows Terminal has evolved and achieves the parity to be measured with modern terminals of other operating systems such as the GNOME Terminal. Not only is it free, it can also be seen with the well-known terminal tools on Windows, such as PuTTY and KiTTY.

Windows Terminal is located under this path for batch processing.

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WindowsApps\wt.exe

Here from KeePass via the field URL with the “cmd://” argument.

For the entry in KeePass, add the following line into the URL field.

cmd://"%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WindowsApps\wt.exe" ssh -v {USERNAME}@{TITLE}

  From the “Title” field, the hostname is passed in {TITLE}, from “User name” the user-ID is passed in {USERNAME}. If a different port is used for SSH add the port e.g. -p 60622

Click OK to close and save the entry. A double-click on the entry in the URL column opens the Windows Terminal.

  Keys generated with ssh-keyen can be used SSH sessions without entering a password and even more securely.

SSH session using Windows KeePass and Windows Terminal

To do this, create the folder.ssh under the home path %USERPROFILE%, in which private and public keys are stored. Then creating the file config to assign hostname to the appropriate key.

Host vm126
    HostName 10.10.0.11
    User james
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
    ServerAliveInterval 60

The public key (id_rsa.pub) is stored on the remote host at ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

the config file offers many options for configuring ssh targets so that they can be started easily in the Windows Terminal CLI.