Error Permission denied (publickey) when I try to ssh

@animesh

When you create a user using useradd, you’ll need to specify their home directory or use usermod to change it (as would be the case if the user already exists).

What I normally do is create the directories first:

mkdir -p /home/myuser/.ssh

Create the authorized_keys file:

touch /home/myuser/.ssh/authorized_keys

Then add the user:

useradd -d /home/myuser myuser

Set proper permissions:

chmod 700 /home/myuser/.ssh

chmod 644 /home/myuser/.ssh/authorized_keys

Set ownership:

chown -R myuser:myuser /home/myuser/*

Once that’s done, you should be able to login with myuser.

If you already have a user:

usermod -d /home/myuser myuser

and then continue with the above.

I would like to discourage people from enabling PasswordAuthentication because it’s less secure than using an ssh key. Here is the answer you’re most likely looking for.

Short Answer: As Root, run the following commands after creating the user:

1. cp -r ~/.ssh /home/{new_user}/
2. sudo chown -R {new_user}:{new_user} /home/{new_user}/.ssh

This is basically copying over the ssh key from the root user to the new user, which I would assume the new user is for you so you won’t have to login as root. If the new user is for someone else you can either create an ssh public key for them and give it to them or have them give you their existing ssh public key and place it in their /home/{new_user}/.ssh directory.