Raspberry Pi Password Tricks

With a whole fleet of Raspberry Pi boards, it's sometimes a chore remembering all the passwords. Short of writing the password on a post-it stuck to each Pi, here are a few tricks.

Set up ssh authentication. If you haven't already, generate the private/public key-pair on your workstation. 

ssh-keygen

Answer all questions with <Enter>. 

This will generate your private key.

~/.ssh/id_rsa

And your public key.

~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Now copy your public key to the raspberry pi.

ssh-copy-id pi@raspberry.lan

Now you no longer need a password when logging in from your workstation because the pi trusts it.

ssh pi@raspberry.lan

You will still need the password when logging in from other devices, but if you ever forget it, you can do a password reset without knowing the password with the following command.

sudo passwd pi