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Setting up SSH to EC2 Instances

2 min read

For existing/running instances:

  1. Navigate to “Key Pairs” in the AWS EC2 console menu.
  2. Create Key pair - name it something memorable or it will default to id_rsa.pem. Check .pem when prompted on the key file format.
    • The browser will automatically download the private key file.
  3. On Mac/linux, use the following command: ssh-keygen -y
    • Then provide the path to the private key file when prompted.
    • The public key will be output.
  4. Connect to the existing instance using EC2 Instance Connect.
  5. Navigate to the .ssh folder, and open the .ssh/authorized_keys file on the instance.
  6. Paste the public key information from your new key pair underneath the existing public key information. Save the file.
  7. Disconnect from your instance, and test that you can connect to your instance using the new private key file.
    • From ubuntu, you can run the ssh command with the -i flag to specify the private key. e.g: ssh -i your-key-ssh.pem ec2-user@13.0.0.1

Info

If you’re replacing an existing key pair, connect to your instance and delete the public key information for the original key pair from the .ssh/authorized_keys file.

For new instances:

Setting up SFTP

After a bunch of trial attempts, Filezilla wouldn’t authenticate properly for me (configured keys, paths, permissions and auth methods several times). Ended up just using SFTP through terminal as suggested here.

Steps:

Connect with the EC2 Instance with:

sftp -i "path/to/key.pem" ec2-user@ec2-54-212-34-84.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com

Downloading files / dirs

To download path/to/source/file.txt and path/to/source/dir:

lcd ~/Desktop
cd path/to/source
get file.txt
get -r dir

Uploading files / dirs

To upload localpath/to/source/file.txt and ~/localpath/to/source/dir to remotepath/to/dest:

lcd localpath/to/source
cd remotepath/to/dest
put file.txt
put -r dir

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