Add Keypair to existing EC2 instance

Question

I was given AWS Console access to an account with 2 instances running that I cannot shut down (in production). I would however like to gain SSH access to these instances, is

Answer 1

On your local machine, run command:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "SomeAlias"

After that command runs, a file ending in *.pub will be generated. Copy the contents of that file.

On the Amazon machine, edit ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and paste the contents of the *.pub file (and remove any existing contents first).

You can then SSH using the other file that was generated from the ssh-keygen command (the private key).