Has anyone managed to get SSH Key Authentication working on Bitwarden Self Hosted? I have the latest version of Server and Clients, but cannot see SSH Key as an option when adding a new item.
@dkidd255 Welcome to the forum!
Don’t ask me for the source at the moment - but I think, SSH is not yet activated for the self-hoster. (probably going to happen with the next release?!)
PS: Ah, see here: How to use SSH Key? - #8 by Quexten
Wish they wouldn’t put stuff in the release notes that isn’t actually released… or make press releases about it… not very nice.
@dkidd255 That I can understand. It would be good, if they added if there is a kind of “phased rollout” for features (and for self-hosting). - From experience in the forum now… some features come with a delay for self-hosting. (e.g. the new UI also had a delay of, I think, one additional release cycle, i.e. about a month)
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Hey! In general, feature flags are used as a way to roll out changes, and to be able to roll them back in case customers encounter issues. Bitwarden has no control over these on self-hosted (and does not generally support them on self-hosted), so self-hosted users get these features whenever the flags are removed and the features are enabled by default.
If as a self-hosted customer, you want to get these features now, you are free to configure your instance to enable these. You can enable ssh-keys and ssh-agent right now using feature-flags on a self-hosted instance. But beware that these are feature-flagged for a reason.
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Can you provide a bit more information on how to enable feature flags? I had already tried adding these to config.yml but that didn’t seem to be the way.
The specific flags needed are:
ssh-key-vault-item: true and ssh-agent: true.
That seems to be targeted towards developers. In regards to Bitwarden i’m just a paying user and don’t plan to dig around in the source code too much. In that regard, I’m not seeing a clear answer on how to enable feature flags on self hosted on this article or elsewhere. The article mentions that self hosted feature flags are not supported, but also mentions that a local config file can be setup but doesn’t specify exactly how to do that, i’m guessing somewhere in one of the docker containers and not in bwdata.
At this point i’ve wasted too much time on this so i’ll just wait until the feature is released, but the Bitwarden team needs to reconsider how they present new features in release notes and via press releases. If the feature isn’t available for all then that should be clearly stated so people don’t spend time testing / trying something out that hasn’t actually been released.
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Hi! I’m just trying to clarify something regarding the feature flags documentation you provided. It seems that the feature flags can only be enabled when running from the source code. Is that correct? In other words, does this mean that feature flags cannot be enabled on self-hosted instances deployed using the official self-hosted deployment script?
So i see that SSH Keys feature flags were added to the latest self-hosted server and i can generate them via the web vault, but now i don’t see the option to enable the ssh agent on the latest version of desktop (2025.2.0) on windows, what am i missing now?
Missing Option:
You would have to manually override the enabled featureflags for y our selfhosted installations. While the documentation is public, it is not an officially supported configuration.
This PR enables SSH item generation, import and ssh-agent on all clients by default on self-hosted: [PM-15149] Remove ssh feature flag by quexten · Pull Request #13506 · bitwarden/clients · GitHub
How many different issues do I have to track to know when this is actually released and available!?
With the latest version of the server, I can now add the ssh keys on the web interface, but can’t actually use them in any of the clients. I’m going back to giving up on this feature and maybe one day as a surprise it will actually work 
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