My buddy Dustin Kirkland pointed me to a neat little utility that he wrote with Scott Moser called ssh-import-id. Since he showed it to me a few months ago, I have used it many times and it has made my life quite a bit easier.

ssh-import-id fetches a the defined user(s) public keys from Launchpad, validates them, and then adds them to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. That’s it, but if you need to add multiple people, or don’t know which key they are going to want used, this will save you time.

Dustin has tried to get it added to OpenSSH, but he hasn’t been able to succeed at this yet.

To use ssh-import-id, you first need to install it if it already isn’t:

sudo apt-get install ssh-import-id

Then to run it you would run:

ssh-import-id chrisjohnston

This would import my public keys. You are also able to import multiple users at the same time:

ssh-import-id chrisjohnston kirkland

If you are looking for the latest version of the code it is available in a ppa:

ppa:ssh-import-id/ppa

If you have problems or want to check out the code, check out the package on Launchpad.