This guide is about setting up a SSH connection without passwords from a local development environment to a live domain site, the requirements are that you have SSH access to the live domain.

Setting up SSH folder on a Remote Domain

SSH into the domain as the domain owner.

By default some hosting providers do not set up a .ssh folder in the domain home.

 

Make a secure SSH directory if it doesn’t exist.

mkdir .ssh

Set the permissions so only the domain owner can read/write and execute

chmod go-rwx .ssh/

Create an authorised keys file inside

touch .ssh/authorized_keys

Now grab you local public secure key file and add it to the remote authorized_keys file.

nano .ssh/authorized_keys

Paste and save.

Now make the authorized_keys file secure

chmod a-w .ssh/authorized_keys

Now from Local you can access

Either on the standard SSH port

ssh username@mydomain.com

Or on a non-standard port

ssh username@mydomain.com -p2000

Once you have this set, it makes things like version control a lot easier.