Copy SSH Public Key to Server Without ssh-copy-id

Updated January 13, 2015     2 Comments
Originally posted October 23, 2013

Shell and Bash

This command will copy your ssh public key from your local machine to your server. This is an alternative for when you don’t have the ssh-copy-id command (for example, on Windows). Replace [user]@[host] with your own username and host.

ssh [user]@[host] 'mkdir -m 700 ~/.ssh; echo ' $(< ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) ' >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys ; chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

This creates the .ssh directory on the remote host with proper permissions, if it doesn’t exist. It creates the authorized_keys file and adds your public key to it. If it already exists on the server, this appends your public key to authorized_keys, and verifies it has proper permissions.

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  2. May 2nd, 2022 at 9:14 pm

    Thanks so much for this! Works perfectly.
    I use alternate ports on my VPS and the command ssh-copy-id doesn’t work with ports other than 22, unless a special parameter is issued on the command line.
    With this, I just add -p and the port number after the ssh command and everything works!

    Reply ↓
    Karl Wagner

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