SSH Key Question[s]

Hi all,
Complete newbie here.

Somewhere in the process of adding a SSH key, I thought I saw a warning to not use my Public key because of potential security threats. Does that sound right? Still, and on the same page, it says something like the key will ‘typically begin with ssh-ed25519…’ or some such. Well… That appears only in my public key. The private key is, a rather long, random string. What is the purpose of it?
A little digging suggest it is the public key required anyhow.

I would’ve preferred adding a passcode, but nothing seemed to happen when I tried. Something did happen tho, because when I decided to leave it empty next time I get the message that passcodes don’t match. ? This is on Win 10 and using standard Command Prompt.

Command Prompt also generated a “key fingerprint” and an associated “randomart image”. I copied it to a text file, just in case, but, again, have no idea what use it might be.

Any thoughts?

TIA

Hi,

it is the public key part that you should copy/paste into gitlab gui and keeps private key safe on you’re host.

May I suggest that you get a little more comfy with how ssh key pair work if you are to use it.
There are tons of blog post that talk about that particular matter

Thank you. I might try to understand some of it, once I can get my head out of some fine tuning of an intended project on GitLab.

I may have misread, but had the impression that an SSH key was required for me to do anything with my project on Gitlab. Anyway the project page (only a fork, atm) looked different after adding the key.

Oh, oops… My project is actually on GitHub. Not sure what happened there…

Uurrgghh… I give up. Looks like something I didn’t need anyway. On GitHub it’s recommended to use GitBash for the purpose. Then I get SHA public key on my profile there, instead of the ssh-ed… public key saved to my computer my computer. ?