How to generate an SSH Key using the terminal

Note: This article relates to a product currently in beta testing.

SSH Keys are a set of public and private keys which are used to authenticate and encrypt network traffic between your workstation and a remote system. The private key is securely located on your workstation while the public key is located on the instance.

This article takes you through the steps of creating an SSH Key Pair in your workstation’s terminal.

Steps

  • 1
    Open a terminal.
  • 2
    Enter the following command: 
    ssh-keygen -t rsa
  • 3
    You can accept the default settings for the prompts that follow.
  • 4
    Default save locations:
    • On Linux and MacOS, the public key is saved to
    ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
    • On Windows 10 and later, the public key is saved to
    C:\Users\<username>\.ssh\id_rsa.pub

What happens next

To connect to your instance using your SSH key, please refer to this article.

Assist Note
  • The private key should be kept safe on your workstation. Should you misplace your private key and haven’t set up any additional users, you will have to rebuild your instance.
  • Xneelo does not support the generation of other SSH key algorithms such as ECDSA, and Ed25519 via the xneelo Cloud dashboard, however, you are still able to generate your own key type and import it to be used with your instance.

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