install your public key in a remote machine's authorized_keys

Problem

We frequently add developer ssh keys to remote machine with following three steps

• ssh username@remote_host
• mkdir -p ~/.ssh
• cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and copy it
• nano ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and paste copied content.

Quite Annoying.

Solution

`ssh-copy-id`.

ssh-copy-id [-i [identity_file]] [user@]machine

Description

ssh-copy-id is a script that uses ssh to log into a remote machine (presumably using a login password, so password authentication should be enabled, unless you’ve done some clever use of multiple identities) It also changes the permissions of the remote user’s home, ~/.ssh, and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys to remove group writability (which would otherwise prevent you from logging in, if the remote sshd has StrictModes set in its configuration). If the -i option is given then the identity file (defaults to ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) is used, regardless of whether there are any keys in your ssh-agent. Otherwise, if this: ssh-add -L provides any output, it uses that in preference to the identity file. If the -i option is used, or the ssh-add produced no output, then it uses the contents of the identity file. Once it has one or more fingerprints (by whatever means) it uses ssh to append them to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the remote machine (creating the file, and directory, if necessary)

And if you get stuck… Ask Here

^{email me rajeevsharma86@gmail.com}