How to scp secure copy to ec2 instance without password

Question

I have an EC2 instance running, and I can ssh into it using my amazon-created key file without password prompt, no problem.

However, when I want to copy a file to the instance using scp I am asked to enter a password:

scp somefile.txt -i mykey.pem root@my.ec2.id.amazonaws.com:/

Password:

Any ideas why this is happening/how it can be prevented?

Answer 1

I figured it out. you had the arguments in the wrong order. This works fine:

scp -i mykey.pem somefile.txt root@my.ec2.id.amazonaws.com:/