ssh-copy-id from old VPS (ec2) to new droplet gives Permission denied (publickey) error

Hello,

I am trying to migrate my web application from my old vps (amazon EC2) to my new droplet, following this DO guide.

I am stuck at copying the SSH keys from the old VPS to the new one. I logged in as ‘ubuntu’ user to my EC2 instance (ubuntu 18.04 OS) and did ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -v. After trying to use the ssh-copy-id command the first time, I saw a Connection timed out error.

I then allowed traffic to port 22 on my droplet as explained in this DO comment by doing sudo ufw allow 22/tcp from the droplet.

However, I tried the ssh-copy-id command again but this time I got a Permission denied (publickey) error.

The exact command I run from the old VPS is (excluding my IP):

ssh-copy-id DROPLET_PUBLIC_IP

I also tried specifying a different user (as amazon EC2 comes with a “ubuntu” user while the droplet has “root”) but I got the same error.

ssh-copy-id root@DROPLET_PUBLIC_IP