Flywheel uses SSH keys to authenticate connections to our SSH gateway. This article will explain how to view existing keys, generate new ones, and use them on Flywheel.
1. What is an SSH key?
2. Checking for existing SSH keys
3. Generating new SSH keys on Mac/Linux
4. Generating new SSH keys on Windows
5. Adding SSH keys to Flywheel
To establish a secure connection between the client (your computer) and the remote server (your Flywheel sites), you must first be authenticated. SSH keys are the method of authentication Flywheel uses, because they provide the best secure encryption.
SSH keys come in pairs – a public key and a private key. The private key is kept on the machine you are authenticating from and the public key is added to Flywheel.
SSH keys are typically stored in the ~./ssh folder on your machine. To check if you already have an SSH key pair, you can look in that directory and see if there are any files by opening up a terminal and typing this command:
cd ~/.ssh; ls
If you see a pair of files named something like id_ed25519 and id_ed25519.pub (or id_rsa), then you already have a key pair and can continue on to adding and deleting keys on Flywheel. If there isn’t a key pair listed, you’ll need to generate one.
Follow these steps to generate a new SSH key pair:
ssh-keygen
command to generate a new pair:
ssh-keygen -a 100 -t ed25519 Generating public/private ed25519 key pair. Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/username/.ssh/id_ed25519):
Note
If creating SSH keys for use with GitHub Actions you will need to substitute rsa
for ed25519
in order to convert to PEM format.
Windows users can generate SSH keys using PuTTYgen. For more information, check out this help article:
Connecting to Flywheel’s SSH gateway using PuTTY
Once a key pair has been generated, it’s time to add the public key to the Flywheel dashboard!
pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
On Windows and Linux:
cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub and copy the terminal output
Trevan’s MacBook Pro
)You’re now ready to connect to your sites via SSH!
If you have any questions about accessing your sites via SSH, please reach out to our friendly Happiness Engineers!
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