Not able to open PuTTy key generator on Mac

I am really new to PuTTY and PuTTY key generator as I am trying to setup EC2 on AWS. I have managed to install PuTTY on my Mac, and PuTTY works fine, but every time I click on PuTTY key generator I see a message (please see the snap attached) and no pop up window. how do I get it to work? I have Mac Mojave.

2 Answers

You're seeing the output you shared because when you run puttygen, it's expecting mandatory command-line arguments to be passed.

• I'm unsure why you're trying to use puttygen since it's mainly used on Windows to generate an SSH key pair. You don't generally need to use it on Mac since Mac OS has a built-in command-line SSH client known as Terminal.

To use Terminal, from the top menu, go to Finder > click Menus > Go > Utilities. Find the terminal which supports SSH connections to remote servers.

Generate KeyPair

• Use ssh-keygen to generate an SSH KeyPair (How to Use ssh-keygen)

If you simply want to log in to your ec2 instance via SSH, using the keypair from ec2:

chmod 400 ~/Downloads/myPrivatekeyFile.pem
ssh -i ~/Downloads/myPrivatekeyFile.pem ec2-user@[ip-address]

Linux/Mac version of PuTTYgen is a command-line tool: See puttygen man page.

It's not a GUI application like the Windows version of PuTTYgen.