Robb. Knight.

Every time I've setup a server in the past decade the SSH keys have been set for me, most hosts I've used do this (DigitalOcean, Hetzner, etc). This week I signed up for a server with Contabo and I had to do it myself, like a caveman. Lewis was kind enough to help because he'd done the same thing mere days before me.

Step one is to copy my key to the server using ssh-copy-id:

ssh-copy-id [email protected]

This failed for me because I didn't have a default set in my SSH config. There are two ways to handle this. One is to specify a key in the command:

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/personal_id_rsa.pub [email protected]

Or set a default in ~/.ssh/config:

Host *
	IdentityFile ~/.ssh/personal_id_rsa

Once that's done you should be able to SSH into the server. The last step is to disable password login which is done by editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

- PasswordAuthentication yes
+ PasswordAuthentication no

Then refresh the ssh service with sudo service ssh restart.