How does Lish utilize my SSH key?

When attempting to access Lish via SSH, you’d typically be required to input your Cloud Manager credentials for authentication purposes. If you configure key authentication access for Lish, you’d no longer need to provide your Cloud Manager credentials when connecting to one of our Lish gateways over SSH. Just so you're aware, you'll never be prompted to provide your Cloud Manager credentials when using browser-based Lish (also known as Weblish).

Lish does not abide by any SSH configurations that you have in place on your Linodes, and you’ll always be prompted to provide the credentials for a Linux user account when you access one of your Linodes' console sessions. This applies for every Lish access method (including Weblish).

you'll never be prompted to provide your Cloud Manager credentials when using browser-based Lish (also known as Weblish).

Why am I being prompted for credentials when trying to login to Weblish?

<img alt="login prompt on weblish" src="https://i.imgur.com/kQ8oYUf.png">

While you won't be prompted to provide Cloud Manager credentials in the Weblish (because you have already logged into Cloud Manager to get to the Weblish), you will still need to provide credentials to access your Linode using the Weblish. If you look at step 4 in those instructions, you'll see this:

The Lish Web Console window appears…From here, you can log in to your Compute Instance with any other username and password available on that system (such as root).

So you'll still need to use credentials to log in, but those credentials will be for the specific instance you're connecting to, not for Cloud Manager. If you're having trouble remembering the credentials for a specific instance, you can reset the root password through Cloud Manager and then log in as root with the new password.