Connecting to Amazon EC2 Servers using Coda and Transmit

We’ve recently moved our servers to a new build on the Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure which has been an interesting process (more posts coming once we’ve launched the site and have a nice cuppa!)

We’re also big biG bIG BIG fans of Panic’s excellent file transfer client (Transmit) and amazing editor (Coda) both of which are Mac-only. However, being used to a keypair from the servers to manage ssh login and sftp transfers, I couldn’t work out how to connect using the default .pem file supplied by Amazon EC2. PEM – or privacy enhanced email – is another cert-based system see the ubiquitous Wikipedia article for more tech juice.

I downloaded my server .pem file to my local ssh directory (you can find this in your user directory called .ssh – notice that the prefix of . makes it invisible normally). I could then login via ssh using

ssh -i ~/.ssh/server.pem

but Coda and Transmit wouldn’t play ball. After some digging around, I discovered the solution…

1. Replace server.pem with your .pem file in the following instructions
2. Copy your server.pem file to ~/.ssh
3. Open terminal and you’ll be in your user directory
4. Edit (or create) the file config with: vi ~/.ssh/config
5. Hit “i” to go into insert mode
6. Add: IdentityFile “~/.ssh/server.pem”
7. Hit: :wq!<enter> to quit and save
8. Change the permissions on your pem file with chmod 700 ~/.ssh/server.pem
9. Configure Coda and Transmit to connect to your server as root with no password
10. Enjoy!

Job done, which was nice!