The first command we'll run from the Terminal is going to check if we have an existing SSH key. Now if you don't, that's fine. We'll go ahead and create one. If you do or you're not sure you do, you can run the following command to confirm whether or not you have one: ls with the al flag. This is going to print all the files in a given directory, and the directory where SSH keys are stored by default on your machine is going to be at the user directory, which you can use (~) as a shortcut for /.ssh:

ls -al ~/.ssh

When you run the command, you'll see all of the contents inside of that SSH directory:

In this case I've deleted all of my SSH keys so I have nothing inside my directory. I just have paths for the current directory and the previous one. Now that we have this in place and we've confirmed we don't have a key, we can go ahead and generate one. If you do already have a key, a file like id_rsa, you can go ahead and skip the process of generating the key.