ssh_keygen Chef Resource

This single-purpose cookbook provides a resource to create SSH keys, as you would expect to be created with ssh-keygen.

Say you wanted to create a user (named after test-kitchen) and create an SSH key for it:

group 'kitchen' do
  action :create
end

user 'kitchen' do
  action :create
  group 'kitchen'
  home '/home/kitchen'
  manage_home true
end

directory '/home/kitchen/.ssh' do
  action :create
end

ssh_keygen '/home/kitchen/.ssh/id_rsa' do
  action :create
  owner 'kitchen'
  group 'kitchen'
  strength 4096
  type 'rsa'
  comment 'kitchen@localhost'
  passphrase 'changeme'
  secure_directory true
end

The following would (after creating the kitchen user), generate an SSH private key in /home/kitchen/.ssh/id_rsa, a public key in OpenSSH format in /home/kitchen/.ssh/id_rsa.pub, and ensure the .ssh directory has secure permissions as well (so mode 0700).

The attributes for the ssh_keygen resource are:

• action: Only :create is supported. This resource does nothing if the file exists.
• path: The path to save the SSH key to (if different from the resource name).
• owner: The owner of the private and public key files.
• group: The group ID for the private and public key files.
• strength: Only 2048 and 4096 are supported currently, default is 2048.
• type: Only rsa is supported currently. Ed25519 may be supported in future versions (feature request welcome!)
• comment: Comment for the public key. Defaults to user@host.
• passphrase: Passphrase for an encrypted private key. The default is no passphrase.
• secure_directory: Sets the directory the key is saved in to mode to 0700.

Copyright 2015 Chris Marchesi

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

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