Question

Bluehost only recommends PuTTy. However, is it possible to use ssh keys without any extra, visible programs in Mac?

I would like to have a connection to my server to be a breeze, so that I can control my server in Terminal.

Answer 1

Of course! On Unix and OS X, the ssh-keygen command will generate public and private keys for SSH public-key authentication. The usual way to invoke this command (on the client) is:

ssh-keygen -t rsa 

This command will ask you where to place your private key; the default place is ~/.ssh/id_rsa, and the public key will be placed in the file of the same name with a .pub extension added (for example: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub). The command also asks you to create a password (‘passphrase’) for the private key; you can leave it blank for no password as I do, but I don’t recommend this practice.

Once you have your public and private keys on the client computer, you need to make your server recognize that public key. If you have shell access to the server, you can upload the public key file with scp, then use ssh to run the following command on the server:

cat id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys  

If your hosting company doesn’t give you shell access (though Bluehost does), or this procedure doesn’t work, it will likely give you a web interface to the same functionality.

Once your server is set up to recognize your public key, it will allow you access without a password when ssh on the client tries to use your private key for authentication. You may still have to enter your private key’s password, but typically you only need to do this once for each client login session.