Jul 29, 2019 Learn how to set up a secure connection to a remote host by generating SSH Keys on Ubuntu 18.04. An SSH Key is a secure method of logging into your server! Generate a new SSH key.Add to the ssh-agent Step 1: Open Terminal. Step 2: Type this below, using your GitHub's account email. Step 3: It will show up this text and you can hit Enter. Step 4: In this section you can hit Enter too or type secure passphrase ( more about passphrase ).
Generating Your SSH Public Key. Many Git servers authenticate using SSH public keys. In order to provide a public key, each user in your system must generate one if they don’t already have one. This process is similar across all operating systems. First, you should check to make sure you don’t already have a key. You can create a SSH Key in Ubuntu via SSH with the following command (navigate to the.ssh directory first and type): ssh-keygen -t rsa To make the process easy, we won't add a Keyphrase for the SSH Key, so as mentioned in the creation wizard just press enter to don't use a keyphrase.
When you work with a Git repository, your project may be actively modified by a lot of people. Some of them may not be trustworthy as they may be new employees or something like that. In this case, if they need to do git pull in the server to update the changes of a commit in your production server, you may not want that everybody knows the password of the repository. Another case where you don't want to provide the password of the repository everytime you do
git pull
or git clone
, are automatized deployments.That's why the the 'deployment keys' feature exist in Gitlab, A deploy key is an SSH key that is stored on your server and grants access to a single Gitlab repository. This key is attached directly to the repository instead of to a personal user account. In this article, we'll show you step by step how you can automatize the deployment process of your project hosted on Gitlab.
1. Find or create an SSH Key for your server
The first thing that you need to do is to verify if your server has already a public key created in the
.ssh
directory of the user in the server, so start a SSH session to your server and type the following command:This will automatically search in the folder of your user that in our case is
/home/vagrant/.ssh
, if the output of the command shows a string that starts with ssh-rsa, then you already have an SSH Key that you can use to add to your repository, so you can skip to the step 2. If instead, you get the output : cat: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub: No such file or directory, then you will need to create an SSH Key first. You can create a SSH Key in Ubuntu via SSH with the following command (navigate to the .ssh directory first and type):To make the process easy, we won't add a Keyphrase for the SSH Key, so as mentioned in the creation wizard just press enter to don't use a keyphrase:
As shown in the image, we no have the
id_rsa
and id_rsa.pub
file in our .ssh
What key combination in linux generates a backspace mean. directory. This key works as a 'pass' that allows to clone/pull your project in the current server, till this point it doesn't do anything, so you will need to follow the other steps.Ubuntu Add Ssh Key Github
2. Configure SSH client to find your GitLab private SSH in the server
As next step you need to establish that, when cloning from Gitlab, the deployment key should be used as authentication instead of an username and a password. For this you need to ensure that
ssh-agent
is enabled by running the following command:Then you can proceed to add your key to the SSH registry using the following command:
To retain these settings you'll need to save them to a configuration file. Normally on OpenSSH clients you can configure this in the
~/.ssh/config
file. If the file doesn't exist, you can create it:And register your key in the file. In this tutorial we are adding a single SSH Key from the Gitlab website (non self hosted version), so our config file content will be:
As you may have multiple projects in one server or a project that uses different repositories that need to be updated, you can without a problem implement multiple SSH Keys in the same file following the notation:
3. Add the Server Key as a deployment key in your Repository configuration
Now you need the public key of your server (created in step 1), in this step you are saying to Gitlab 'Hey, if someone uses this SSH Key to clone, allow him to do it'. You can get the content of the public file using a text editor via SFTP, or just by printing the output of the file with SSH using the following command:
![For For](/uploads/1/2/6/1/126131775/811542523.png)
Generate Ssh Key Windows
This would output in our case the content of the public key:
Keep that long string in the clipboard as you will need it to paste it in Gitlab. As next acccess the Settings of your Repository in Gitlab, in our case as we are using the non self hosted version of Gitlab the configuration for the Deploy Keys is in
https://gitlab.com/<username>/<repository-name>/settings/repository
. The menu to add a new deploy key looks like this:Here you would only need to add the content of the
id_rsa.pub
file, provide a title and decide wheter the server can be used to push changes as well or not (normally unchecked as it is production). Once the key is added in your repository, you should be able now to clone/pull your repository in the deployment server.4. Clone and pull repository to test
![Ubuntu Generate Ssh Key For Github Ubuntu Generate Ssh Key For Github](/uploads/1/2/6/1/126131775/717878364.png)
Generate wpa-psk aes key. As final step, to verify if everything went right you can clone your repository to see if the credentials of the repository are requested or not, in case it does, please read the tutorial again and check what you did wrong. Otherwise, you will be able to clone your project using the following command:
Note
Remember to clone via SSH, not HTTPS, otherwise you may obviously be asked for the credentials.
By doing this you may have noticed that you didn't have to input your Gitlab username nor password thanks to the deployment key!
Happy coding !
What does SSH Keys do in Github / Bitbucket?
Set up SSH to reduce the risk of exposing your username and password.Some reasons you might want to use SSH key base authentication:
- Is more effective if you push and pull from Bitbucket many times a day.
- Removes the need to enter a password each time you connect.
Url formats of the repository differs from
HTTPS
to SSH
:Environment
- Operating System : Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (64-bit)
Add SSH Keys in Ubuntu 16.04
The following steps showed the step by step installation guideline.
Set up your default identity
From the terminal, enter
ssh-keygen
at the command line.The command prompts you for a file to save the key in:It will create two files; one public key file and one private key file.Both file will have your given name.
Add Key files in local machine
Keep both of the files in
~/.ssh
location.Add the public key to your bitbucket settings
- In Bitbucket go to
Bitbucket settings>Account settings>SSH keys>Add key
- Copy the contents of your public key file using the following command:
N.B.:
id_rsa
is the name I have given when generating the key files. It might be something else for your case.3. Copy and paste the public key in the key
field in Bitbucket and include proper label. Click Save
.Ensure Bitbucket SSH connects successfully
Return to the terminal window and write:
For github
Give your passphrase which you have given when generating the key files.If your connection is successful then you will get output like following:
For Github:
References
- Set up an SSH key: Bitbucket documentation
- Change existing folder remote url: Github documentation