Trying to ssh into my newly created droplet and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to solve this error I’m getting after successfully creating my key pair on my local machine:
Permission denied (publickey).
I have chmod 700 my /.ssh folder, and I have chmod 644 my /.ssh
Still the same error, hopefully someone can help me solve this.
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Hello there,
You can check our article on How to Upload an SSH Public Key to an Existing Droplet
You can access the droplet from the DigitalOcean console and then temporary enable the PasswordAuthentication on your droplet and access the droplet with a password to upload the ssh-key.
If you haven’t created new pair of keys you’ll need to do that first.
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.This change can be made from the DigitalOcean’s console. If you’re having issues accessing the console you can then reach to our amazing support team that can help you further with this.
To enable the
PasswordAuthentication
follow these steps:sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
PasswordAuthentication
from “no” to “yes” and save the filesudo nano ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
PasswordAuthentication
from “yes” to “no” and save the fileYou can then upload the key using this command:
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/mykey user@droplet
Hope that this helps! Regards, Alex
@sshjerk
You should only need to setup
.ssh
for individual users. Theroot
user already has this directory on Ubuntu –~/.ssh
– and it’s permissions are already set.So what you need to do depends on who you’re trying to set the SSH Key up for.
…
For
root
, you’d generate a key pair locally and add the public key to~/.ssh/authorized_keys
. You’d then use the private key to log in.For example, I’m on MacOS, so I’d open up Terminal and run:
From there, I’ll be prompted to set a location for storing the keys generated by the command, so I’ll provide a path and name. You’ll then be prompted for a passphrase and asked to confirm.
Once the key is saved locally, you can then
cat
it locally and then copy and paste it to the server or us thessh-copy-id
command. I normally copy and paste :-).…
If you’re setting up SSH Keys for non-
root
users, you need to make sure the user is setup properly.Now that the new user is setup, you can copy the public key to the users
authorized_keys
file.…
The public key doesn’t need to exist anywhere other than in the
authorized_keys
file on the Droplet. The private key should not be uploaded at all, instead, only used locally to connect.@sshjerk
To enable public key authentication you must do the following:
1- On your local machine, create a ssh key par with
ssh-keygen
. 2- Copy your public key to the server usingssh-copy-id <username>@<server ip>
3- Then you can login usingssh <username>@<server ip>
Hope this helps.