SSH Keys

An SSH key record stores one of your public keys against a friendly name. You reference that name (or the raw key) when creating a VM and Excloud installs it into the default user’s ~/.ssh/authorized_keys at first boot.

Register a key

# From a file
exc compute key create --name my-key --ssh-public-key-path ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

# Or inline
exc compute key create --name my-key --ssh-public-key "ssh-ed25519 AAAA…"

List / delete

exc compute key list
exc compute key delete --id 3

Console

1. Open console.excloud.dev/console/ssh-keys.
2. Click Import SSH Key.
3. Enter a name, paste the public key, and import it.
4. Use the row actions to copy or delete existing keys.

Use at VM create

Pass either the registered name or a raw public key string:

exc compute create --ssh_pubkey my-key ...
exc compute create --ssh_pubkey "ssh-ed25519 AAAA…" ...

The CLI sends whichever you supplied; the server resolves a name to the stored key.

Default user

The default Linux user depends on the image:

Image	User
Ubuntu	ubuntu
Excloud Ollama (Ubuntu-based)	ubuntu

exc compute connect and exc compute exec default to ubuntu; pass --user if you’ve created another account.

Rotation

Registered keys are inserted only at first boot. Rotating a key on an existing VM is your responsibility:

exc compute exec --vm-id 42 --command 'echo "ssh-ed25519 AAAA…" >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

…or, much better, just use Instance Connect and stop rotating long-lived keys altogether.

Terraform

The matching resource is excloud_ssh_key, which slots into excloud_compute_instance.ssh_pubkey.