Using SSH without passwords OR pass phrases

For some reason, I did NOT know about this ... until I found about it, and now I know :-)

I've been happily SSHing into the VMs that comprise my IBM Cloud Private (ICP) environment, and less-than-happily needing to find/copy/paste the passphrase of my SSH key pair ....

So I'd run the command: -

ssh root@dmhicp-mgmtmaster.fyre.ibm.com

and then have to go off to my password vault to find the pass phrase for my public key: -

~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Well, no longer, thanks to a combination of ssh-add and the native macOS Keychain.

I used this command: -

ssh-add -k ~/.ssh/id_rsa

and this command: -

ssh-add -l

to validate that it'd been added ( this returns a fingerprint ) and this command: -

ssh-add -L

to show the public key in its entirety.

The ssh-add command is documented here: -

https://www.ssh.com/ssh/add

I also ended up with a config file in my ~/.ssh directory: -

cat ~/.ssh/config 

Host *
 AddKeysToAgent yes
 UseKeychain yes
 IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

probably because I've also been tinkering with GitHub: -

Connecting to GitHub with SSH

but the TL;DR; is that I can now access my Ubuntu VMs without a darn password OR passphrase.

Which is nice!