Generating a public key for those automated remote scripts

I've been using vlad to deploy apps lately, which makes deployment a breeze. However, for a complicated deploy, I'm usually asked at least 10 times to re-enter my password.

I was originally too lazy to set up a public key, but after doing 10 deploys one day (another story), I reconsidered. After all, typing the same thing over and over again = violates all kinds of fairly logical assertions, like DRY for one.

Here is what I did to set up a public key on my deployment server.

(1) on my client box:
ssh-keygen -t dsa

ssh-keygen will ask for a passphrase. Dont enter one -- that kills the whole point of using a public key to automate ssh/scp actions!

ssh-keygen generates two files in ~/.ssh:
id_rsa -- your private key used in ssh authentication.
id_rsa.pub -- the public key you can spray out to machines you want to copy things to.

Then do the following:

scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub machine:/~/.ssh/authorized_keys2

now your logins should be password (and pain!) free.