SSH Key Pair Generation

To generate a ssh key follow the instructions for your platform:

Windows


  1. Open the Windows settings
  2. Click "Optional Features"
  3. Click "add a feature"
  4. Search for "OpenSSH Client"
  5. Select and install "OpenSSH Client"
  6. Open Windows PowerShell
  7. Follow the steps below for Mac/Linux
Alternatively you can use Putty. To do this download puttygen from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html and follow the instructions here https://the.earth.li/%7Esgtatham/putty/0.77/htmldoc/Chapter8.html#pubkey-puttygen Please choose EdDSA as the key type and 255 as the key size

Mac/Linux


Open up a terminal and run:
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C '[email protected]'

Follow the on screen instructions. Once generated run
cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub (assuming you used the default file path when generating the key, if you didn't run cat /path/you/specified.pub

Copy the output, it must start with ssh-ed25519 if it doesn't then you probably ran cat on your private key and should not share this with anyone.

It is very important that you keep the private key private.

Your key pair will be used for both SSH command line access and SFTP file transfer.

SSH/SFTP clients

I recommend the following ssh and sftp clients.
Windows SSH: Open SSH
Windows SSH: Putty
Windows/Mac SFTP: Cyberduck
Windows/Mac/Linux SFTP: FileZilla
Mac/Linux have ssh already installed using the command ssh in the terminal.