ssh-key.md

Generating a ssh key

Open a terminal or command line and execute the following command:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your_email@example.com"

OR

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email@example.com"

depending on what algorithm you want to use (ed25519 is the newer one). Then follow the command prompt and either keed the default path $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa or give the file a new name, but remember the full path to this file! ($HOME/.ssh/id_rsa_new_name)

Run ssh-keygen --help or man ssh-keygen if you want to see what the options mean and how to use the executable. For example [-t dsa | ecdsa | ed25519 | rsa]: the -t option is the type of algorithm to use and allows one of the 4 options before (-bis the byte size and -C is an optional comment)

If you decide to use the ed25519 algorithm you will need to perform an additional step of adding the 'ssh-key' to your 'keychain'; depending on your system this might not be done automatically as opposed to the sha keys (more info here). Both algorithms are secure and the speed difference is no issue when generating just one key for one user (more discussions on this topic here)

ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

Once you have the new key generated (and active) add it to your Github account by copying the contents of the public key to the clipboard. For this you can either open ~/.ssh/id_<keyname>.puband copy the contents or use a command line such as catpr pbcopyor xclipif you have them installed:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Copy the contents (that are displayed in the terminal), then go to github, log in go to your account settings

then select SSH and GPG keys>New SSH key, paste the contents and save the new key!