Generate SSH Key

Quick reference

• 00:04 We need to do one more thing before we install Ruby on Rails which is generate
• 00:08 an SSH key.
• 00:09 And an SSH key is a security feature,
• 00:11 it allows us to connect to other web sites securely.
• 00:15 And we're going to use that to push our code up to GitHub later on for
• 00:18 version control.
• 00:19 Ruby on Rails also requires an SSH key, I believe,
• 00:22 just to be handy on your computer so we'll go ahead and do that now.
• 00:25 So I've opened up Git Bash, I just went to my Windows Start menu, typed in Git and
• 00:30 the Git Bash icon popped up, went ahead and clicked it and this is the screen.
• 00:34 So your's will look a little different up here.
• 00:37 Mine says flatplanet-PC because that's the name of my computer.
• 00:40 I don't think the world is flat I just find it hilarious that some people do so
• 00:43 I named my computer that.
• 00:45 Whatever your logged in user name is or computer name is,
• 00:48 that's what you'll see there.
• 00:50 And if we actually type in pwd,
• 00:52 we can see right now we're in the C drive Users/flatplanet.
• 00:56 This is just the default directory and that's where we want to be.
• 01:00 Of course, your's will say something besides flatplanet but you get the idea.
• 01:03 So the first thing we need to do is create a directory in order to hold our SSH key.
• 01:08 So I'm going to use the command mkdir, it stands for make directory.
• 01:12 And then I want to type in .ssh, and this will create a directory called .ssh.
• 01:18 And a directory with a period in front of it means that the directory is hidden,
• 01:21 you won't be able to see it.
• 01:23 And since this is a secure SSH key thing, that's what we want.
• 01:27 We want this directory to be hidden.
• 01:28 So, we can click that.
• 01:29 Now, we need to move into that directory to create our key.
• 01:33 So, we're going to change directory, use the cd command and then just type .ssh.
• 01:38 And you can see right here it shows that we're in .ssh.
• 01:42 Or we can type in pwd and it'll confirm we are in fact in the .ssh directory.
• 01:49 So now, I'm going to clear the screen, just type clear.
• 01:52 And in order to generate a SSH key, it used to be really hard,
• 01:55 you used to have to download software to do it and it was a huge hassle.
• 01:59 These days there's a key generator built into this Git Bash terminal,
• 02:02 which was one of the cool things about it.
• 02:04 One of the reasons why we like to use it.
• 02:06 So to create an SSH key, you just type in ssh-keygen.exe.
• 02:14 And it runs this little thing and it asks where we would like to save it,
• 02:17 we just want to save it in this directory that we're in so I can just hit Enter.
• 02:21 Now it's asking for a passphrase or a password.
• 02:24 Now, if you'd like to enter a password here, go ahead.
• 02:28 If you type on your keyboard a password, it won't show up on the screen,
• 02:31 that's a security feature but don't worry, it's actually typing it in.
• 02:35 But personally I don't ever put a password here
• 02:38 because this is already a security feature.
• 02:41 Adding a password on top of it seems like overkill to me.
• 02:44 And you just don't really need to, there's no hackers that are going to
• 02:47 compromise your system if you don't have a password for this thing.
• 02:50 And later on when we push our Ruby on Rails code up to GitHub it'll ask for
• 02:54 a password for your SSH key if you created it now.
• 02:58 So if you type a password now, remember that password, you have to know that
• 03:02 forever, but me personally, I'm not going to put a password in.
• 03:06 I just don't think you need to, so I'm going to go ahead and Enter.
• 03:09 It says enter the same passphrase again.
• 03:11 I didn't type one, so I can hit Enter again.
• 03:13 If you did type on, you'll have to enter it again.
• 03:15 And boom, it's created our SSH key.
• 03:17 So now, if we clear the screen, and type in ls to list the stuff that's in
• 03:22 this directory, we see there's these two files, id_rsa and id_rsa.pub.
• 03:30 This is the private key and this is the public key.
• 03:32 It's the public key that we're interested in.
• 03:34 And in fact we can take a look at it by typing cat to catalog it out onto
• 03:39 the screen.
• 03:40 And then id_rsa.pub and this is our SSH key.
• 03:46 So it's just a bunch of gobbledygook.
• 03:48 It doesn't mean anything to us.
• 03:49 But it's kind of cool that we've created it now.
• 03:51 Later on when we push our code up to GitHub,
• 03:54 we'll have to copy this SSH key and paste it into GitHub.
• 03:58 So to do that you just come back to this directory, type in cat id_rsa.pub.
• 04:04 This thing will pop up.
• 04:05 Highlight it all, right-click it and copy it.
• 04:08 And you can just paste it into GitHub.
• 04:10 We'll probably talk about it more later on.
• 04:12 But this is where it will be if you ever need it.
• 04:15 And so now, we're good to go.
• 04:17 We have all the tools and all the things that we need to for Ruby on Rails to
• 04:20 download and install, so in the next video we'll go ahead and do that.

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