How do I add SSH Keys to authorized_keys file?
You should never save the file with its contents starting with -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
on the server, that is your private key. Instead, you must put the public key into the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
file.
This public key has the .pub
extension when generated using ssh-keygen
and its contents begin with ssh-rsa AAAAB3
. (The binary format is described in the answers to this question).
The permissions of ~/.ssh
on the server should be 700. The file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
(on the server) is supposed to have a mode of 600. The permissions of the (private) key on the client-side should be 600.
If the private key was not protected with a password, and you put it on the server, I recommend you to generate a new one:
ssh-keygen -t rsa
You can skip this if you're fully sure that nobody can recover the deleted private key from the server.
If this does not help, run ssh
with options for more verbosity:
ssh -vvv [email protected]
On the server side, you can review /var/log/auth.log
for details.
An alternative way to install your public key in the remote machine's authorized_keys
:
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh USER@HOST "mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
Some advantages:
does not require
ssh-copy-id
to be installed.guarantees that
mkdir
works before attempting to appendid_rsa.pub
toauthorized_keys
.
If you have login based authentication then use ssh-copy-id
to append your public keys to remote server.
ssh-copy-id user@host