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Add SSH key after creating a droplet

Posted on May 14, 2014

Hi There,

I did not add the SSH key before creating the droplet. Now my server is all set and is about to go live. I cannot setup another one but really need to add an SSH key.

Is there any way I could do that. Also I cannot se any droplet resize option available, any ideas why is that? I’m currently running LAMP on Ubuntu 12. 512 MB droplet.

Thanks.

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Andrew SB

May 14, 2014

Accepted Answer

To add a SSH key after the creation of the droplet, you need to add the contents of the public key to the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys You can do that by running this on your local computer: <pre> cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh root@your.ip.address “cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys” </pre> You need to power down the droplet before you can resize it.

Nathan

July 11, 2017

I am attempting to follow

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-ssh-keys-with-putty-on-digitalocean-droplets-windows-users

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-ssh-keys-with-putty-to-connect-to-a-vps

maesk

October 3, 2018

Exactly! I had to add an SSH key to an existing droplet but couldn’t log in via SSH because of “permission denied (publickey)” so all these instructions are not working if you disabled password login. I lost a lot of time trying to get access to my droplet from a new computer. The only solution was to get my old computer and log in from there with the old SSH key. The Digital Ocean console is completely non-functional. It just doesn’t work. If I paste in my SSH key it gets altered, upper-case letters become lower-case letters, the string is cut off in the middle etc. and it’s extremely slow and non-responsive. All in all a very frustrating experience!

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