webficient

If you’re Web programming on a Mac and are moving data around using the SSH network protocol, it’s a good idea to setup an SSH key on the destination server. You’ll speed up your workflow by not having to enter a password each time.

Setting up a key is pretty easy. First create the key on your machine using Terminal:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -C "me@mymachine"

Then, run this command to create a special directory on your server that is needed for SSH key authentication. The username must be the one you’re going to use for SVN, Capistrano, etc. You can have a key for each user, e.g. deploy.

ssh username@subdomain.host.com 'mkdir ~/.ssh;chmod 700 ~/.ssh'

Then deploy the key to your server using the username you want to associate with the key:

scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub username@subdomain.host.com:~/.ssh/authorized_keys2

Then update the permissions on the server for the authorized_keys file you just created:

ssh username@subdomain.host.com 'chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2'

Note: the above commands assume your destination machine is using the more secure, SSH2. For SSH, just change ‘authorized_keys2’ to ‘authorized_keys’ above.

You’re done. To test everything is working, you can simply ssh username@host via Terminal. If you’re still getting a password prompt, then you may have missed something.