The idea is to have a way for an admins to SSH into a server without having to use passwords. This adds a level of security to your server setup. Without private keys you have to enter your user name and password. This can be less secure than generating SSH keys and adding your public key to SSH, plus with keys you don’t have to remember passwords.
First you need to generate the SSH keys. I prefer the ed25519 algorithm which is a newer one. You can get more info here.
The code to create an ed25519 ssh key in the current users .ssh directory will look like this.
ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/key-name -t ed25519
The -f flag tells ssh-keygen the name of the files you want to create. The above command would create key-name(private key) and key-name.pub(public) key, in the current users .ssh directory. The ~ is a Linux shortcut meaning /home/current_user/ so you don’t have to type all that.
The -t flag tells ssh-keygen what type of algorithm to use. If you don’t specify the -f flag and give the file a name, then both files are output in the current users .ssh directory as ed25519 and ed25519.pub
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