Ansible is an incredible configuration management and provisioning utility that enables you to automate all the things. In this series, you’ll learn everything you need to know in order to use Ansible for your day-to-day administration duties. In the second episode, we take a look at some foundational knowledge, specifically OpenSSH which is required for Ansible to work.

Generate an ssh key

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "jay default"

Copy the ssh key to the server(s)

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub <IP Adderss>

Generate an ssh key that’s going to be specifically used for Ansible

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "ansible"

Copy the ssh key to the server(s)

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/ansible.pub

Use an SSH key to connect to a server

ssh -i .ssh/<key_name> <IP Address>

To cache the passphrase for our session, we can use the ssh agent

eval $(ssh-agent)
ssh-add

Here’s an alias you can put in your .bashrc, to simplify it

alias ssha='eval $(ssh-agent) && ssh-add'