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ssh-import-id

This tool allows you to connect to a public key server, retrieve users' public keys, and append them to the current user's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

It can import keys from GitHub or Launchpad.

Importing Public Keys from GitHub

There's an additional function from ssh-copy-id that will allow you to copy your GitHub SSH authentication keys instead of your local user's keys.

The command for this is ssh-copy-id-gh (not supported on all distros by default).

ssh-copy-id-gh USER_ID_1 [USER_ID_2] ... [USER_ID_n]
# or
ssh-copy-id gh:USER_ID_1 [gh:USER_ID_2] ... [gh:USER_ID_n]
There are two ways to do this:

  • Use the ssh-import-id-gh command.
  • Prepend gh: to the user IDs.

This uses the GitHub API, located at https://api.github.com/users/%s/keys, where %s is the GitHub username.

This can take several user IDs at once.