ssh-copy-id script works only against *nix servers (or servers with *nix emulation), as it internally executes some *nix shell commands on the server (like exec, sh, umask, rm, mkdir, tail, cat, etc).
You can setup the key manually. I'm aware that you know that, but as there are subtle differences, when doing that on a Windows server, I'll mention it anyway for benefit of other readers.
Main steps are:
- Create the
.ssh folder in your Windows account profile folder (typically in C:\Users\username\.ssh).
- Create
authorized_keys file in the folder and add your public key to it.
- Make sure that the ACL of the
.ssh folder and the authorized_keys are set so that only a respective Windows account have a write access to the folder and the file and the account that runs the server have a read access. Also note that the location of the file for Administrators is overridden in the default sshd_config file to %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\ssh\administrators_authorized_keys.
For details, see my guide for Setting up SSH public key authentication on Win32-OpenSSH.
If you want to do that from your local machine, you can do it using sftp. Particularly if you have no key on the server registered yet, you can just upload the id_rsa.pub file as authorized_keys file:
$ sftp martin@example.com
martin@example.com's password:
Connected to martin@example.com.
sftp> mkdir .ssh
sftp> cd .ssh
sftp> put id_rsa.pub authorized_keys
Uploading id_rsa.pub to /C:/Users/martin/.ssh/authorized_keys
id_rsa.pub 100% 401 197.5KB/s 00:00
sftp> bye
The above is basically, what ssh-copy-id does internally – Except that ssh-copy-id appends the authorized_keys, what plain sftp cannot do. If you need to append, you can download authorized_keys to the local machine, append it locally and re-upload it back.
Alternatively, you can setup the key from another Windows machine using (my) WinSCP client, with its Install Public Key into Server function.
See also my answer to Setting up public key authentication to Linux server from Windows (ppk private key).
