How to generate SSH keypair
You can easily create an SSH
key pair by using ssh-keygen
as in the following example.
$ ssh-keygen Generating public/private rsa key pair. Enter file in which to save the key (/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa): Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa. Your public key has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. The key fingerprint is: 1a:6c:a4:94:df:e0:19:ec:85:b0:3f:27:e4:a1:de:65 user@host The key's randomart image is: +--[ RSA 2048]----+ | | | . | | o E | | O o | | c @ S | | o A @ | | . E . | | . = | | . | +-----------------+
There are a few things that you might want need to take note;
-
A 2048 bit
RSA
key pair will be generated by default. You can use different key type by using-t
option and specify any of the supported key typesdsa ecdsa ed25519 rsa rsa1
-
The private key will be stored in
~/.ssh/id_rsa
while the public key will be stored in~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
. You can specify other location when prompted during the key generation process if you already have a key pair at the default location -
You can specify passphrase for your key pair when prompted but you’ll have to not set the passphrase to use passwordless
SSH
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