How to Make Putty Automatically Login with User and Password

In this article, you’ll learn to make a one-click Putty shortcut to your server from your desktop. What’s so great about that? If you are a web developer or operate your own server and use Putty, then you probably know how much of a pain it is to have to open putty and enter the URL, user and password each time you need to open a command prompt on your remote server. Imagine being able to simply click a link on your desktop to open a command prompt to your remote server! Wouldn’t that be great? I think it is. Here is how you can make a direct single click link to a remote server on your desktop:

1. Locate your Putty program. Normally it would be somewhere like C:/ProgramFiles/Putty or similar. However, it could be anywhere. I installed mine in a special C:/Desktop/Tools directory as you can see in the image below, but yours is most likely in ProgramFiles.
2. Once you locate putty.exe as in the image above, right click on putty.exe and select “send to/Desktop(create shortcut)” to create a shortcut on your desktop. It will look like this:
3. Right click on the shortcut like in the above image and select “rename” and give the shortcut a name that identifies it as a link to your server such as example.com or whatever name you like.
4. Right click on your new example.com shortcut and select “properties” and edit the target attribute to read:
   “C:\Program Files\PuTTY\putty.exe” root@207.158.15.233 -pw your_password
   Be sure to change “C:\Program Files\PuTTY” to the correct path of your putty.exe file. Change “root” to the user you would use to login to your remote server and edit “207.150.12.233” to equal either the IP address of the remote server or the domain name such as “example.com”. Finally, edit “your_password” so that it is the correct password for the username you used in place of “root” previously. Once the target field is correct, click “Apply” then “OK” to commit the change.
5. Now simply double click on your new shortcut and a command prompt to your server will magically open! Magic!

I’ve been using Putty for years and always thought there was no way to store a password for a remote server connection using Putty, so I was absolutely thrilled to learn of this little known secret for creating a desktop shortcut that logs you into your server with putty and without having to enter your password every time!