How to connect the local computer to GCP using SSH

4 min readFeb 9, 2021

This post was inspired by a challenge I faced during my weekly learning task, wrote this because the materials I used were scattered I thought that I’d write about it here.

I completed this task using a MacBook

Start with opening a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) account, the link below will help

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRXMuMQQ27c

Then move on to generate ssh key

Using ‘ssh-keygen’ then run the command in terminal

It will ask where we want to save the key and what file we want to save as

The default is going to be wherever our home directory for our logged in user and ‘.ssh’ which is going to be a hidden folder by default and the file name will be ‘id_rsa’ that’s going to be the name of the private and public key difference Is that the public key will just be ‘id_ras.pub’

We can just use the default by pressing enter

It will prompt for a passphrase which you can also decide not to have one by clicking enter two (2) times it will be asked

This should create your key

If you want to see your key you can ‘ls .ssh’

We can see both the public key and private key

If we want to see what’s in our public key we can use the cat command

The above is what our public key will look like the private key is longer, but we will only be using the public key

Adding your ssh key to the ssh-agent

Start the ssh-agent in the background.

First, check to see if our ‘~/.ssh/config’ file exists in the default location.

If we see this ‘.ssh/config’ does not exist. don’t be scared we are still on the path

If the file doesn’t exist, create the file.

Let’s open our ‘~/.ssh/config’ file, then modify the file, replacing ‘~/.ssh/id_rsa’ if we are not using the default location and name for our ‘id_rsa’ key.

Host *

AddKeysToAgent yes

UseKeychain yes

IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Let's add our SSH private key to the ssh-agent and store our passphrase in the keychain. If we created our key with a different name, or if we are adding an existing key that has a different name, replace ‘id_rsa’ in the command with the name of our private key file.