SSH and SSH keys (e.g. from GitHub)

[kradalby]

Hi,

This saved me a ton of time, great job, I have an idea that I might give a go to implement later if I have time, but figured I'll suggest it first if anyone wants to take a stab at it.

I often find myself wanting to SSH into the machine straight away to apply a more complicated config after setting up the machine and it would be great to have a neat way to add SSH keys and activate OpenSSH.

The script could ask:

• Do you want to enable OpenSSH Server (and open the firewall)
• Ask if you want to add keys to the created user
  • Since writing keys are tedious, support fetching them (e.g. https://github.com/kradalby.keys)
• Optionally allow the same to be turned on for root and only allow login with keys

[samuela]

Hey @kradalby, it's great to hear that you've gotten use out of nixos-up! Streamlining the process of adding SSH keys and enabling OpenSSH sounds like a neat improvement. With nixos-up I really try to keep a watchful eye towards feature creep, but I could envision that this could be worth adding assuming that a clean enough design can be found.

I agree that typing in SSH keys sounds like a bad UX. That's a neat trick re pulling them off GitHub -- didn't know that you could do that! I guess your proposal is that you could provide your GitHub username and then nixos-up would handle scraping those keys and adding them to your profile?

[mahalel]

Hey, I think that would make sense, the Ubuntu installer features a similar setting. It pulls your pubkey from your Github profile based on your username.

[samuela]

Hey, I think that would make sense, the Ubuntu installer features a similar setting. It pulls your pubkey from your Github profile based on your username.

Cool! Didn't know they did that