Adding an SSH key to your Account when using Plesk Onyx
For most Linux users you will be familiar with connecting to your server using SSH Keys this takes a lot of the hassle of connecting and remembering lots of passwords if you have lots of servers, as you can use the same SSH Key with a passphrase so you only need to remember the one password, I personally recommend creating keys for every server but this is down to your own discretion and usage, if you are connecting on an internal network then the same key would be fine where as public servers may differ as security should be much higher and will depend on your own security policy’s.
Now with the hosting on a Plesk Linux server you can connected in multiple ways FTP FTPS SFTP and SSH depending on your permissions, if you have SFTP or SSH access then you can add an SSH Key to connect to your hosting space with the help of the SSH Key Manager Extension.
The Extension is very simple to setup and use, to get started you need to have a pair of SSH Keys and have SFTP/SSH access enabled in Plesk.
The first thing to do is to add the SSH Key Manager Extension from the extensions management page if this has not already been installed.
To install the extension go to Extensions then select Extensions Catalog, then find the SSH Keys Manager extension and install it, this should only take a minute.
Once installed you are then ready to add your SSH Key to your subscription.
Before adding the SSH Key goto your subscription and make sure you have have SFTP access, from the Websites & Domains section select Web Hosting Access.
From the Web Hosting Access you will see your username which you will need to take note of as you will need this later, you will also see the options Access to the server over SSH, this should be set to /bin/bash (chrooted) at the very least.
Once you have checked that you have SSH access enabled the next step is to add the SSH Key, if you do not already have an SSK Key pair then you will need to generate them, on Windows you can use PuTTygen, on Linux you can do this from the command line (not going to cover generating keys here will assume you have them already).
To add the public key select the SSH Keys on the top right hand side of the Websites & Domains section, this will then give you the option to add a key or remove an existing key.
Select add key then copy in your public key to the text area and select add key.
Once thats been done you should now be able to login using your username and key, I personally use WinSCP so I create a new session set it to SFTP add in the server hostname and username then under the advanced setting SSH Authentication set the private key then save the session, this then allow me to login quickly every time.
[cryptothanks]