Your create a RSA authentication keys to be able to login a remote site from your account, without having to type your password.

Note that once you are set this up, if an intruder breaks into your account/site, they are given access to the site you are allowed in without a password, too! For this reason, this should never be done from root.

  • Run ssh-keygen(1) on your machine, an just hit enter when asked for a password. This will generate both a private and a public key. With older SSH versions, they will be stored in ~/.ssh/indentity and ~/.ssh/indentity.pub with newers ones, they will be stored in ~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
  • Next, add the contents of the public key file into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the remote site (the file should be mode 600).

You should then be able to use ssh to log in to the remote server without being asked for a password.