Jon Allured

Computer Programmer, Whiskey Drinker, Comic Book Reader

Configure Prompt on iOS With SSH Keys

published 06/05/21

I got a fancy new iPad recently and bought a copy of Prompt so that I could SSH into my servers from the comfort of my couch. The process turned out to be more tricky than I expected so here's my notes on how I did it.

Generate the Keys

The first step was to generate the keys, I did this like so:

$ ssh-keygen -m PEM -t rsa -C "prompt@cypher" -f keys/prompt/cypher

Add Public Key to Server

This won't work if you don't add the newly generated public key to the server so let's do that next:

$ ssh-copy-id -i keys/prompt/cypher.pub domino -f

Add Private Key to Prompt

This is the part that caused me some trouble. There's an interface in the Prompt app to add keys by picking a file from your iCloud Drive but it didn't behave as I expected. I had the keys there but they were greyed out and I couldn't pick them.

Interface in Prompt for picking SSH keys.

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What I figured out was that they needed a file extension in order to work:

$ cp keys/prompt/cypher ~/Desktop/cypher-private.txt

Then I could find and pick that file as the key in Prompt and it would add it to the list of known keys. Next was finishing the server settings in Prompt and saving them so that it could be one-tap to connect. Behold:

Connected to Domino in Prompt.

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