Import SSH keys for remote server

Question

I have an Ubuntu 15.10 X64 and I am working on a project for which I am trying out GIT. I have created a repo on one of our remote servers, which is a Debian server, and the repo is accessible via SSH from command line as well as from Intellij. If you need any info, please let me know

I am trying to access it via a GIT-UI tool called GitGraken. It is looking for ssh keys for our remote server. How can I get those keys and add it for my user on the system so I can keep an eye on the repository. Any help would be nice.

Solution 1

You can create a ssh keypair in the terminal with the command: ssh-keygen. Then you have to add the public key(.pub).

see man ssh-keygen for more options

Solution 2

Use ssh-copy-id

If your local machine has the ssh-copy-id script installed, you can use it to install your public key to any user that you have login credentials for.

Run the ssh-copy-id script by specifying the user and IP address of the server that you want to install the key on, like this:

ssh-copy-id demo@SERVER_IP_ADDRESS

Solution 3

Finally, this link from debian helped. I created a key first with following command on my local machine :

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Then I copied contents of the public key(/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) into authorized keys on the server. After that I was able to login without password and solve the problem.

Comments

[We are Borg]

Shouldn't there already exist a key on the server as it's running an open-ssh server? Shouldn't I add it?

[We are Borg]

I get an error : /usr/bin/ssh-copy-id: ERROR: No identities found

[muru]

Isn't this what the other two answers tell you to do?

[We are Borg]

@muru : DanG's did, but was not detailed enough. But was helpful.. I have accepted it as the answer. Thank you. :-)

[muru]

Actually copying the key to authorized_keys on the remote server is ssh-copy-id's job.

[We are Borg]

@muru : It is not working though, that's the first thing I tried after creating the key, dunno why its failing.

[We are Borg]

@muru I get this error: /usr/bin/ssh-copy-id: ERROR: ssh: Could not resolve hostname /home/akshay/.ssh/id_rsa: Name or service not known

[DanG]

@user68186, yes, thx! Ive edited my post. sorry for that issue. .pub --> Public Key. Never share or transfer your private key

[We are Borg]

@muru : Just installed ssh-copy-id, so don't think its a version issue.

[Gen]

Did you add server where that key will be copied? ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@<ip-or-domain>

[We are Borg]

@Gen : The -i parameter just specifies the path from which the file is to be copied, I didn't specify that as the remote server user had the file in correct location with correct name...