Using `ssh-copy-id` with the 1Password SSH agent

The SSH agent is one of 1Password’s best features but using it obfuscates things a bit more than I am used to with just files in ~/.ssh/*.pub. In particular I was used to being able to scp my public key onto my servers. I was tempted to see if I could get my public key out of the ssh-agent and pipe it into ssh but then I thought “surely there’s a better way…”

And there is! ssh-copy-id does exactly what I want. All you have to do is make sure you have SSH_AUTH_SOCK set¹.

ssh-copy-id will copy to the target all of the keys currently loaded in the agent. If you don’t want to include everything you might want to consider updating your agent config file to only include the key(s) you want².

Here’s how this looks in practice:

# list keys currently in the agent
ssh-add -l

# dry run copying the key(s)
ssh-copy-id -l -n user@host

# copy key(s)
ssh-copy-id -l user@host