I’ve been working on some GitHub Actions workflows to automate deployment and found this SFTP upload action:

I found it to do the job quite nicely, but one irritation I have with it is its use of .pem files for its private key. I had done this a while ago and completely forgot how to do it, so here is goes up here so I can remember it again.

Generating the SSH key pair

This goes like every other time I have to generate an SSH key. Though, to maximise compatibility with different SSH clients, I opt for rsa here.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -m PEM

Make sure you don’t wipe out your personal SSH key (~/.ssh/id_rsa*) by accident.