Having to repeatedly enter passwords is a drag. And enabling password based SSH login to your SVN servers is a security risk. So I’m pretty excited that Chris Andrews implemented SSH agent forwarding into net-ssh-1.1.0.

Update to the latest version of net-ssh with:

sudo gem update net-ssh

To enable it, put the following into your ~/.caprc:

ssh_options[:forward_agent] = true

This stopped me getting prompted for a password by my subversion every time I ran ‘cap deploy’.