How To Install SSH Server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SSH Server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenSSH (OpenBSD Secure Shell) is a connectivity tool that enables remote login via the SSH protocol, hence eliminating eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other attacks. It helps to secure all network communications by encrypting all network traffic over multiple authentication methods through a secured tunnel.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the SSH Server on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install SSH Server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing SSH Server on Ubuntu 20.04.

Run the following command to install the SSH server on the Ubuntu system:

sudo apt install openssh-server

After the SSH server package installation, the SSH server daemon should be up and running. To check the status of your SSH server executes the following command:

systemctl status sshd

Step 3. Configure Firewall.

Open ssh port 22 for incoming traffic on your firewall:

sudo ufw allow ssh

If you are not sure if you are actively using the UFW firewall, you can run the “ufw status” command:

sudo ufw status

Step 4. Configuration SSH Server.

Now sometimes we may want to change some settings (for example, the port, and root login permission). This can be done by editing the configuration file via command:

nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

The first thing you may want to do is to change the default SSH listening port. Open the file and locate the line that specifies the listening port:

Port 22

Change it to something else. For example, to 4646:

Port 4646

Save the file and close it. Then restart the service for the changes to take effect:

sudo systemctl restart sshd

Step 5. Connecting to your SSH server.

In order to connect to your SSH server, you are going to use the ssh command with the following syntax:

ssh -p (port) (username)@(ip_address>)

For example, in order to connect to my own instance located at 127.0.0.1, I would run the following command:

ssh -p 2222 (user)@127.0.0.1

Congratulations! You have successfully installed OpenSSH. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing SSH Server on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official OpenSSH website.