Login via SSH Key

This is a follow on to my previous post ‘ Simple Security on a Linux VPS ’ in which I said I would post about how to setup SSH key access on a server. SSH key access works by adding your local machines identify to a file on the server called authorized_keys. Once your key is in the file, you can login as that server user using your local key. Previously, I would SSH onto the server and paste my local SSH key into authorized_keys using nano but I’ve since found a much quicker way to do it by running this command.

ssh-copy-id <username>@<host>

Simples!