Wednesday, April 27, 2022

[SOLVED] AWS CLI: Key is not in valid OpenSSH public key format

Issue

How to solve this?

# I used this command to create the key with a password
$ ssh-keygen -b 2048 -t rsa -C "awsfrankfurt" -f ~/.ssh/awsfrankfurt

# Then when I try to import it into AWS EC2, the error appears:
$ aws --region eu-central-1 ec2 import-key-pair \
    --key-name "awsfrankfurt" \
    --public-key-material ~/.ssh/awsfrankfurt

An error occurred (InvalidKey.Format) when the ImportKeyPair operation: 
Key is not in valid OpenSSH public key format

Solution

Create your key and then when calling aws's --public-key-material argument, call it with file:// in front of your key path.

Example:

$ aws --region eu-central-1 ec2 import-key-pair \
    --key-name "awsfrankfurt" \
    --public-key-material file://~/.ssh/awsfrankfurt  # <-- this

This is a weird issue, because, file:// prefix is usually used for Windows, but, here with aws, it applies to unix based terminals as well.



Answered By - Inanc Gumus
Answer Checked By - Marie Seifert (WPSolving Admin)
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