This post is part of a series about using SSH more effectively. SSH is one of those programs that a lot of developers interact with but few seem to take full advantage of. This series highlights some of the very powerful features that have saved me a lot of time over the years.
Stop typing your password when connecting to remote servers
I really hate having to type my password over and over again when logging into remote machines. If you don’t have
something already automatically giving you SSH access to the servers you access regularly don’t worry, you can
give that access to yourself using the ssh-copy-id command. This should work out of the box on OS X and Linux; if
you’re on windows you can use something like this gist to mimic it.
ssh-copy-id username@serveraddress
If you want to add a key other than your default one you can do that with -i:
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/mykey user@serveraddress
Now the next time you run ssh username@serveraddress you should be immediately logged in without being prompted for a
password.