Is there an equivalent to ssh-copy-id for Windows?

Solution 1:

ssh-copy-id is a pretty simple script that should be pretty easy to replicate under windows.

If you ignore all the parameter handling, error handling, and so on, these are the two commands from ssh-copy-id that are actually doing the work most of the time.

GET_ID="cat ${ID_FILE}"
{ eval "$GET_ID" ; } | ssh ${1%:} "umask 077; test -d .ssh || mkdir .ssh ; cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys" || exit 1

Using the putty tools a command like this should be equivalent (not tested).

type  public_id | plink.exe username@hostname "umask 077; test -d .ssh || mkdir .ssh ; cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys"

If you want to do all the same error handling, and the automatic key location, I am sure writing a script under Windows will be a lot trickier, but certainly possible.

Solution 2:

These answers didn't help me out. I really didn't need any crazy scripts. I had created a public key on my client machine in git bash and was trying to copy it to a VPS.

After creating your public key, the key should be stored as "(whatever folder you started in)/.ssh/id_rsa.pub"

So use this command:
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh [email protected] "cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys" where user is your username (sometimes "root", or whatever you may have set up), and replace 123.45.67.89 with your machine / host / VPS's IP address.

If the directory .ssh is not yet created on the host machine, use this small variation:
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh [email protected] "mkdir ~/.ssh; cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

Solution 3:

ssh-copy-id does a couple of things (read the man page for details), but the most important thing it does is append the contents of your local public key file to a remote file called authorized_keys.

• You could do this yourself by opening the key file with a text editor and pasting the contents in the Kitty terminal.
  echo 'long_line_with_contents_of_public_key_file' >> .ssh/authorized_keys

• Alternatively, you could upload the file using WinSCP (which uses sftp, or scp as a fallback) and do something similar to my previous suggestion, without the ugly copy/pasting.
  cat id_rsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys
  where id_rsa.pub is the filename of the public key you uploaded.