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.
You should only need to setup .ssh for individual users. The root 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:
ssh-keygen -a 500 \
-b 4096 \
-C "" \
-E sha256 \
-o \
-t rsa
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 the ssh-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.
mkdir -p /home/mynewuser/.ssh
touch /home/mynewuser/.ssh/authorized_keys
useradd -d /home/mynewuser mynewuser
chmod 700 /home/mynewuser/.ssh
chmod 644 /home/mynewuser/.ssh/authorized_keys
chown -R /home/mynewuser
chown root:root /home/mynewuser
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.