SSH keys are the recommended way to securely access cloud virtual machines, push to GitHub, use many file transfer applications and connect to a range of other remote services. In this article, we’ll walk through how to create an SSH key and avoid common pitfalls along the way. 🔐💻
Generate the Key
Let's get straight to it and generate our public/private ssh key. For this example we will use the RSA encryption , use the command below to create the keys.
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096
As shown below, you'll be prompted to enter a file path to save your SSH public/private key pair. 🔍
Note that if you leave this blank (which is perfectly fine), the keys will be saved to /home/$USER/.ssh/id_rsa by default. If you prefer to use a different name or location, be sure to enter the full path — not just the filename — or the key will be created in your current working directory (which you probably don’t want)."
Below is an example of saving the key with a custom name instead of the default. This is especially important if you're creating a second SSH key or plan to manage multiple SSH public/private key pairs on your machine. In this case, I use the path /home/admin/.ssh/mykey — where /home/admin/.ssh/ is the .ssh directory (note that admin is my sudo username), and mykey is the custom name I've chosen for the key."
OK since I used a custom key name rather than the default, I will add the key to the ssh-agent ensure to replace 'mykey' with whatever you named your key.
eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
ssh-add ~/.ssh/mykey
Connect to Server with SSH Key 🔑