Using a shell script to provision SSH keys

The safest way to deal with passwords is to not use them at all. Using SSH keys is a great way of avoiding passwords completely if we are able to get a public key connected to a user account that the user can log in to without using the password, and since only their private key enables login, this makes the whole transaction much safer.

This recipe deals with just such a task, installing a new machine that is going to serve as a LAMP server and that will enable users to log in using no passwords at all.

Getting ready

In reality, a script such as this will be used if we have a few servers to install and not too much time. An alternative to something like this would be to use a proper orchestration tool such as Ansible, but although it is an enormously powerful tool, Ansible is too complicated for small deployments.

In any case, this script presumes only that our server has a working internet connection to be able to get the...