coryd.dev-eleventy/src/posts/2020/ssh-directory-permissions.md

title	date	draft	tags
.ssh directory permissions	2020-11-09	false	ssh development

I was recently setting up a new, always-on machine that I do occasional dev work. This dev work typically consists of routine maintenance and, a requirement of that, is sshing into and running software updates on manually managed servers (yes, manually managed¹).

I sync my .ssh configuration using mackup. However, while setting up and then using a key I received a warning that my configured .ssh directory permissions were too open. If you ever run into this, the solution is fairly simple²:

chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 644 ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Try reconnecting using the key in question and the warning should be resolved.

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1. Think small-scale WordPress or one-off projects. ↩︎

2. Where id_rsa is your key name. ↩︎