c: Copyright (C) Daniel Stenberg, daniel@haxx.se, et al. SPDX-License-Identifier: curl Long: key Arg: Protocols: TLS SSH Help: Private key file name Category: tls ssh Added: 7.9.3 Multi: single See-also:
--keyPrivate key file name. Allows you to provide your private key in this separate file. For SSH, if not specified, curl tries the following candidates in order: ~/.ssh/id_rsa, ~/.ssh/id_dsa, ./id_rsa, ./id_dsa.
If curl is built against OpenSSL library, and the engine pkcs11 is available, then a PKCS#11 URI (RFC 7512) can be used to specify a private key located in a PKCS#11 device. A string beginning with pkcs11: is interpreted as a PKCS#11 URI. If a PKCS#11 URI is provided, then the --engine option is set as pkcs11 if none was provided and the --key-type option is set as ENG if none was provided.
If curl is built against Secure Transport or Schannel then this option is ignored for TLS protocols (HTTPS, etc). Those backends expect the private key to be already present in the keychain or PKCS#12 file containing the certificate.