Raspberry PI SSH Keys

This is my cheatsheet based upon Passwordless SSH access on the official Raspberry PI website.

On the Mac create a key (once) with a passcode

ssh-keygen

Add the key to your Mac keychain

ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Optionally create a file ~/.ssh/config with these contents which contains the UseKeychain yes line which tells OSX to look at the keychain for the passphrase.

Host *
  UseKeychain yes
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Then copy your key to your Raspberry PI

ssh-copy-id pi@192.168.1.x

SSH to the PI

ssh pi@192.168.1.x

Next edit your /etc/ssh/sshd_config to turn off plain text password authentication and restart sshd.

sudo sed -i "s/#PasswordAuthentication yes/PasswordAuthentication no/g" /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

Now you can SSH without a password and without getting pestered that the default password hasn’t been changed.

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