How to set up ssh so you aren't asked for a password

You can create a RSA authentication key to be able to log into a remote site from your account, without having to type your password.

Note that once you've set this up, if an intruder breaks into your account/site, they are given access to the site you are allowed in without a password, too! For this reason, this should never be done from root.

You should then be able to use ssh to log in to the remote server without being asked for a password.

Important: Note that everyone that has read access to the private key file can use it to have the same passwordless access to the remote site. This includes any person that has root access to your local machine. Therefore it's strongly recommended that you use a passphrase for your private key if you are not the only root on your machine. You can use ssh-agent(1) and ssh-add(1) to type your passphrase only once for all uses of a specific key in a session. You can automatically load all your keys in the agent by adding the following lines to your ~/.xsession file:

      # if use-ssh-agent is specified in /etc/X11/Xsession.options
      # (this is the default) then you need only the second line
      # eval ssh-agent
      ssh-add <filename-of-ssh-key>

The ssh-askpass package must be installed in order to run ssh-add without a terminal.