Ssh – Download public & private keys from Google Cloud Instance

google-cloud-platformgoogle-compute-enginescpsshssh-keys

New to the cloud so pardon this question as I'm certain it's relatively simple!

I've setup my Google Cloud Instance and I'm now trying to connect to it using FileZilla. I have a good understanding of how to do this… but I've been completely unable to download my .ppk file, public key, and private keys. The documentation clearly gives the folder that the files are located in…. but I'm unable to navigate to these folders (it's as if they don't exist) furthermore I'm not really sure how to download something to my computer through the SSH terminal.

Also somewhat infuriating is that I've found the keys in the web portal on Google Cloud however there is no option to download them. I can only view them in clear text.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Best Answer

Consider to use command line tools:

Install Cloud SDK for your platform. This would initialize your local environment. First time you'll try to access instance via gcloud SSH/SCP functionality, Cloud SDK will generate a key locally as ~/.ssh/google_compute_engine and inject your user and public SSH key into project-level metadata. Then there is google-accounts-daemon service running by default on each Linux VM which polls project metadata, creates local users on a VM as needed and puts relevant public SSH keys into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.
Use gcloud compute scp to copy files to and from Google Compute Engine virtual machines via scp

Related Solutions

SSH Key – How to Create a Public Key from a Private Key

Use the -y option to ssh-keygen:

ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -y > ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

From the 'man ssh-keygen'

 -y      This option will read a private OpenSSH format file and print an
         OpenSSH public key to stdout.

Specify the private key with the -f option, yours might be dsa instead of rsa. The name of your private key probably contains which you used. The newly generated public key should be the same as the one you generated before.

Ubuntu – Multiple SSH private keys for the same host

I would do it like this:

Host project_1
    HostName github.com
    IdentityFile /etc/ssh/my_project_1_github_deploy_key

Host project_2
    HostName github.com
    IdentityFile /etc/ssh/my_project_2_github_deploy_key

and then use project_1 or project_2 as the host to access the repository.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

SSH Key – How to Create a Public Key from a Private Key

Ubuntu – Multiple SSH private keys for the same host

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