How to generate SSH keys

What is an SSH key?

An SSH key is a cryptographic keypair used to authenticate you to remote servers without needing a password. The private key stays on your local machine and the public key is uploaded on servers you want to access.

How to generate an SSH KeyPair?

On your local machine, open a new terminal window or Windows Powershell (If you're on windows) and run the command below and make sure you change [email protected] with your actual email address.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "[email protected]" -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -N ""

Note: This generates a KeyPair in your user directory under .ssh folder. You must be on Windows 10 22H1 or newer to use this command.

Fetching your public key

Now that you have generated your SSH KeyPair, we'll fetch the public key so you can add it to your https://virt.crunchbits.com account and use it with your servers. Copy and paste the command below depending on your OS.

MacOS/Linux

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Windows

And done! The output you get is your SSH Public Key which you can upload on our VPS Control Panel.