What's the difference between Github and Putty SSH key placement configurations?

The github instructions say to setup your SSH keys开发者_如何转开发 in ~/.ssh using the windows git bash program.

I have in the past used Putty to manage ssh keys.

What is the difference between the 2 setups?

This is for my own git server.

I know this is a pretty old question, but here's the answer:

Basically, PuTTY stores all its sessions in the Windows registry, rather than in a config file in a home folder, whereas the default git+ssh setup uses openSSH and it's style of key configuration (files that are typically stored in ~/.ssh, i.e., /home/<username>/.ssh).

In Windows, if you'd rather use PuTTY than openSSH, set an environment variable named GIT_SSH to C:\your\putty\folder\plink.exe. Then, you can reference any saved session in PuTTY by using a remote url of the form ssh://<session name>/<repository path>. This allows you to, for example, specify particular keys with each session, similarly to how you could use ~/.ssh/config to specify a particular key with the IdentityFile option.

Git uses an SSH program to deal with SSH accesses, basically the default one depending on your system (look at the GIT_SSH environment variable). So it's just to ease the configuration that they say to setup SSH keys in ~/.ssh. If you want to put SSH keys in another directory, just tell it by using ssh-add /path/to/your/key.