The thing with SSH authentication is I can never remember the steps to generate an SSH key, and then add that SSH public key to the remote server so SSH authentication works.

I had all of this in a text file, but honestly, I reference my own blog for knowledge on how to do things all of the time, I thought I’d write up a quick post.

You can find numerous blog posts on this, but I always seem to find a straightforward explanation to give me what I need, that I just consulted my text file on my desktop.

Generating An SSH Key

This will generate both private and public keypairs.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "johnsmith@gmail.com"
# Generates a new private and public keypair, using the email as the label

You’ll be asked to enter a keyphrase. Personally, I don’t use keyphrases for my keys (I know I probably should). So, I skip the following.

Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:

For the key names, by default it’ll generate id_rsa and id_rsa.pub but you can name these whatever you want. Because I am dealing with CI providers like Travis CI and GitHub Actions, I generate keys every time I do something with a server.

Add Your Public Key To The Remote Server

Basically, we copy the contents of the public key and store it in the authorized_keys file in the .ssh folder on the server.

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh username@domain.com 'cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

If you kept the default name, keep id_rsa.pub as the key name. For username@domain.com add in your server username and the server domain name or IP address. The second string part just copies the contents of the file into the authorized_keys file on the server.

Recently, whilst working on an open-source project I work on we found ourselves running out of space on the server. The weird thing is the projects on the server themselves were barely 100mb in total file size, but we had run out nonetheless.

After a little investigation to see what is using up the majority of space, the search led to the /usr/src folder which contains source header files for Ubuntu’s APT package manager. A trove of files in here weighing around 100mb seemed to add up to 4 gigabytes of used space.

While it might be tempting to delete these, you shouldn’t touch this folder manually. Using sudo apt-get autoremove the package manager will cleanup unneeded source files in this folder. In this instance, it resulted in 4 gigabytes freed up.

Recently in Ubuntu which I use for my hosting operating system of choice I needed to bulk change permissions on a bunch of folders and files. I needed to set permissions on folders within a WordPress installation to 755 and all files in theme, plugin and asset directories to 644.

While my command line-fu is not very strong, I was able to work it out and I thought I would share my findings here for others.

To bulk change permissions on folders:

find /yourlocationwithfolders -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

To bulk change permissions on files:

find /yourlocationwithfolders -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

You can use the -R recursive flag with chmod, but it will not allow you to set permissions on all folders and files, but rather on everything (which is rare you would want to set permissions on everything to be the same).