Connecting via SSH without password prompt

SSH is the common way to connect remote machines these days. Almost all kinds of applications use SSH in background for communicating with end machines.

But sometimes typing password repeatedly for establishing a SSH connection with the trusted end machine is quite daunting task.

Let us see how to automate the things in 3 simple steps where we can ssh to "user@host" without asking a password every time. Replace user with the username and host with the remote machine ip-address or hostname. For E.g. john@192.168.245.129

NOTE: Only do this with trusted machines.

1. Login to your local machine from which you want to ssh to remote machine. Go to your .ssh folder.

cd ~/.ssh



2. Check if you have a 'id_rsa.pub' (or 'id_dsa.pub') file in .ssh folder. If not, try below command:

ssh-keygen -t rsa 


To make it simple just keep on pressing the ENTER key a bunch of times, even when it asks for a password.


3. Run ssh-copy-id

ssh-copy-id -i id_rsa.pub user@host 

If it asks for remote machine password then provide it so that it can create a security key successfully so that you dont need to remember password everytime.

Its done .. Now you can ssh to user@host without being prompted for password.