I kept having to re-learn how to do passwordless authentication with ssh in Linux, so here’s the cheat sheet. For the purposes of discussion, client is the machine from which you are connecting, and server is the host machine to which you will connect. That is to say:

adam@client:~$ ssh server
adam@server's password:

On client, generate a key:

adam@client:~$ ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/adam/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/adam/.ssh/id_rsa
Your public key has been saved in /home/adam/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:(...) adam@client
The key's randomart image is:
(...)

The public key, found in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub, will now contain a line that looks like this:

ssh-rsa Xy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uX18ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll9fLn4ifi5fLn4ifi5fLn4ifi5fLn4ifi5fCl8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll9fLn4ifi5fLn4ifi5fLn4ifi5fLn4ifi5fICBOb3RoaW5nIHRvIHNlZSBoZXJlICBfLn4ifi5fLn4ifi5fLn4ifi5fLn4ifi5fXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXwpfLn4ifi5fLn4ifi5fLn4ifi5fLn4ifi5fXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uXy5+In4uX18ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8ufiJ+Ll8K adam@client

Copy this line and connect (with your password) to server. If it doesn’t already exist, create ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Append the above line to that file. You should now be able to connect from client to server without a password.

Note: If you want to connect in the other direction, you will need to perform the same steps: generate a key with ssh-keygen on server and its id_rsa.pub line to client.

Making this work with VS Code

To make your VS Code automatically authenticate to a remote host, you’ll want to copy the newly-created id_rsa (not the id_rsa.pub) file to C:\Users\jquser\.ssh\. For example, from within WSL:

adam@client:~$ cp .ssh/id_rsa /mnt/c/Users/adam/.ssh/