Skip to main content
Software development for researchers

Public keys

Last modified
Table of contents

Public keys

This is a short overview of how to get your public key. This key is extremely useful for many reasons, one of them being collaboration, remote access, and git hosting platforms.

Github/Gitlab

If you can push and pull to github or gitlab using ssh, you have already uploaded a key to their website. You can find this key by going to https://github.com/username.keys. This is exactly the same on gitlab, e.g. on our IRF instance it would be https://gitlab.irf.se/username.keys.

Do i have a key?

To check if you have a key first run

1

ls ~/.ssh

If any of the results end in .pub, that is your public key. The name of the key is usually the type of key it is (that is the default). For example mine is called id_ed25519.pub because it uses the Ed25519 schema.

Warning!

Do not share, upload, version control or otherwise send your PRIVATE key in any way. The private key is the one without the “.pub”. Making this key public is like loosing your house key, and it sucks to change the locks.

I do not have a key

Follow the Use SSH keys to communicate with GitLab tutorial.

Sharing your key

To share your public key when someone asks for it, you can either:

  1. Send the https://github.com/username.keys link
  2. Print the one with cat ~/.ssh/id_KEY_TYPE.pub and copy the text from the terminal
    • Or be fancy and use cat ~/.ssh/id_KEY_TYPE.pub | xclip -selection clipboard for X11
    • or cat ~/.ssh/id_KEY_TYPE.pub | wl-copy for Wayland, to get it directly into the clipboard

There are of course additional methods but these are the basic ones that should apply to most who take this course.

To top
× Zoomed Image