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SSH and Access Updated 2026-05-27

Add an SSH key

Add a public SSH key to your Stack Harbor PaaS account so you can connect to environments through the SSH Gate. Covers the difference between public-key (account access) and private-key (Git repo) management.

To connect to your environments over SSH from your local machine, you add the public half of an SSH key pair to your PaaS account. The platform’s SSH Gate then accepts connections authenticated with the matching private key.

This page covers adding a public key for account access. Adding a private key — used by the platform to authenticate to your remote Git repositories on deploy — is a separate flow under SSH Access to Git Repository.

Before you start

You need a generated SSH key pair on your local machine. If you don’t have one yet, see Generate an SSH key for ECDSA, EdDSA, and RSA recipes on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

The platform supports the following key types:

  • ECDSA
  • EdDSA (Ed25519)
  • RSA

Ed25519 is the recommended default for new keys — short, fast, and well-supported.

Add a public SSH key

  1. Open Account Settings. In the dashboard, look at the upper toolbar and click Settings.

  2. Find the SSH Keychain. The Account Settings tab opens with SSH Keychain already selected on the left. This page also lists what the SSH protocol can be used for on the platform with a few documentation links.

  3. Switch to Public. Under SSH Keychain, click the Public sub-tab. This is where account-access keys live (as opposed to private keys used for Git).

  4. Click Add Public Key. The dialog appears with a single multiline field for the key body.

  5. Paste the public key. Paste the full content of your public key file (for example the body of ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub). The Title field auto-populates from the comment at the end of the key — typically user@hostname — but you can override it with anything descriptive like laptop, work-desktop, ci-runner.

  6. Click Add Key.

The key appears in the list. The platform also emails you a confirmation that includes the key fingerprint and the SSH connection string you can paste into your client to connect.

What gets attached where

The added SSH key is attached to your account, not to a single environment. Every environment under that account accepts connections authenticated with the key. There is no per-environment key management.

If you need to grant access to a specific environment to a teammate without giving them your account, use the platform’s collaboration features — they have their own key pair on their own account.

Removing a key

Each key in the list has a red X button next to it. Click it to remove the key from your account. Removing a key immediately revokes its ability to authenticate through the SSH Gate.

Multiple keys

You can add several keys to one account — a common pattern is one key per device (laptop, desktop, CI runner). They all coexist; any of them can authenticate. This is the cleaner alternative to copying one private key across multiple machines.

See also