Why does the SSH URL have "git@" rather than "@"

Question

Sorry this is probably a silly question but I'd like to understand why the SSH URL for Stash repositories are "ssh://git@..." rather than "ssh://<user>@...".

Everything is working fine, this is purely to improve my understanding as this confused me slightly.

jhinch (Atlassian) · Accepted Answer

Stash has a restriction that ensures public keys are unique system wide. Due to this we can figure out who is the authenticated user based on the public key rendering the username in the ssh address useless. We use the username 'git' because it is similar to hosting sites such as Bitbucket or GitHub (although they often use this special user in order to hook into openSSH which is not a requirement for Stash).