SSH credentials

SSH public key authentication relies on asymmetric cryptography to generate a public and private key pair. The public key remains on the target (remote) machine, while the private key (and passphrase) is stored in Tower as a credential. The key pair is used to authenticate a Tower connection with your SSH-enabled environment.

All credentials are (AES-256) encrypted before secure storage and not exposed in an unencrypted way by any Tower API.

Create an SSH key pair

To use SSH public key authentication:

• The remote system must have a version of SSH installed. This guide assumes the remote system uses OpenSSH. If you are using a different version of SSH, the key generation steps may differ.
• The SSH public key must be present on the remote system (usually in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys).

To generate an SSH key pair:

1. From the target machine, open a terminal and run ssh-keygen.
2. Follow the prompts to:
   • specify a file path and name (or keep the default)
   • specify a passphrase (recommended)
3. Navigate to the target folder (default /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa) and open the private key file with a plain text editor.
4. Copy the private key file contents before navigating to Tower.

Create an SSH credential in Tower

• From an organization workspace: navigate to the Credentials tab and select Add Credentials.

• From your personal workspace: select Your credentials from the user top-right menu, then select Add credentials.

Property	Description	Example
Name	A unique name for the credentials using alphanumeric characters, dashes, or underscores.	my-ssh-creds
Provider	Credential type	SSH
SSH private key	The SSH private key file contents.	-----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----b3BlbnNza....
Passphrase	SSH private key passphrase (recommended). If your key pair was created without a passphrase, leave this blank.

Once the form is complete, select Add. The new credential is now listed under the Credentials tab.