SSH Basics

Table of contents
  1. Create a key pair
  2. Copy public key to remote server

Create a key pair

Base command structure is as follows:

ssh-keygen -t <algorithm> -C <comments>

Then follow the prompt.

Do not use ssh-rsa algorithm as it is rejected by modern OpenSSH servers. Use rsa-sha2-256, rsa-sha2-512, ed25519, etc. instead.

Copy public key to remote server

The following command will copy your public key to remote server’s authorized_keys file.

It will also check for duplicate keys and will not add the key if it is.

ssh-copy-id -i <path_to_pub_key> <remote_host>

References: