In some situations, you are given only a ppk file for access to a cloud server. You know, however, it’s for Putty on windows, not for OpenSSH client which might be the most familiar to you.🤔

This post explains a method to convert a ppk file into a pem file so that you can login to the linux server with ssh command that you are most familiar with.

First off, install putty-tools on your machine.

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sudo apt-get install putty-tools

Then convert your *.ppk file into a *.pem file like so:

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puttygen ppkfilename.ppk -O private-openssh -o pemfilename.pem

Pretty simple, isn’t it? 🙂

Secure the pem file, it’s important, as you may know.

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chmod 400 pemfilename.pem

Now you can ssh to the server using the PEM file.

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ssh -i pemfilename.pem user@server-ip

Thanks for reading!