For the “Enter passphrase”, leave it blank.

Type name for the file to wpengine_rsa or any other, but remember the name as we need to use it in Sublime SFTP config file.

To do so, follow these steps (on Mac/Linux): To resolve this problem, you need to generate a new SSH key without any passphrase and then use this SSH key file name in place of “ssh_key_file” option in Sublime SFTP config. Then I tried something that resolved the problem for me. So I kept digging in myself testing various things, e.g., clearing up “~/.ssh/known_hosts” file, changing Sublime SFTP config settings to keep connect alive with “keepalive” setting, but nothing did the trick. They suggested another solution which didn’t work as my problem was completely different than they suggested the solution for. I then contacted WP Engine support but they didn’t have any clue how to resolve this. I did many searches on Google but couldn’t find anything that could resolve this problem. This immediately became a nightmare because I had been working on that live site for hours. The problem was that it kept showing the same two fields one after another after every 2-3 minutes.

When I entered the password, it connected to the server successfully. When I entered my passphrase for id_rsa, it opened another field to enter the SFTP password.

When I used the Sublime SFTP config to enter the login credentials, and opened a file and uploaded, it prompted “Enter ssh key passphrase for ~/.ssh/id_rsa”.

Recently, I faced a problem with using Sublime SFTP extension to map my local directory to a WP Engine live installation.

Sublime text sftp passphrase for key