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- DigitalOcean
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- DigitalOcean

Digital Ocean console is trimming my ssh key.

Posted on June 11, 2019

I copy the full key from my computer, then I paste into the DO console and it doesn’t not paste the entire key. What’s going on?

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brewpixels

June 20, 2019

I thought it was just me. This solved my problem, thx.

efox

June 12, 2019

Hey there,

The Copy/Paste functionality of our web console is a bit odd; the code backing it is custom due to the way the VNC window is implemented for accessing your Droplet. It isn’t a good idea, in my experience, to rely on the console for long copy/pasting like an SSH key.

My recommended method to get the key on the Droplet is over SSH itself. You can enable PasswordAuthentication for your Droplet by modifying your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file. Once set to Yes restart the SSH service and connect via an SSH client for a more stable connection. You can then modify your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file to add the appropriate public key.

Regards, Ethan Fox Developer Support Engineer II - DigitalOcean

(Check out our fantastic community articles: https://www.digitalocean.com/community)

alexdo

December 1, 2020

Hello, all

Keep in mind that you can also put the key in a file hosted on any Dropbox or remote server and then you can just download it via the console using curl or wget

This should do the job for you as well.

The other option is to temporary enable the PasswordAuthentication from no to yes in order to access your droplet using password and then once you’ve entered your key to disable the PasswordAuthentication again. This way is considered more secure than uploading the key to a Dropbox in case you don’t have any other server to us.

Login to the console on DigitalOcean website.
Type sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Change PasswordAuthentication from “no” to “yes” and save the file
Open a terminal on your computer and type ssh username@[hostname or IP address] or if on a Windows box use PuTTY for password login making sure authentication parameters aren’t pointing to a private key
Login with password
Type sudo nano ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Paste public key text here and save the file
Type sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Change PasswordAuthentication from “yes” to “no” and save the file
Log out and attempt to log back in (if using PuTTY make sure you set up auth parameters to point to your private key)

Hope that this helps! Regards, Alex

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