Key based authenication with net-sftp in Ruby

Question

I want to be able to use SFTP to login into a number of servers and download certain files to help debug issues as and when they arise. While we could use a client, we wante

Answer 1

It's automatically done, just upload your public key and should work out of the box.

Connecting using public/private keys

Public/private keys are always tried before the explicit password authentication, even if you provide a password. Thus, if you only want to use public/private key authentication, simply remove the password from the argument list. If you can successfully obtain a session handle, then your keys are set up correctly!

• http://net-ssh.rubyforge.org/ssh/v1/chapter-2.html#s2