SCP Permission denied (publickey). on EC2 only when using -r flag on directories

Question

scp -r /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs/keypairfile.pem uploads ec2-user@publicdns:/var/www/html

where uploads is a directory returns Permission denied (publicke

Answer 1

The -i flag specifies the private key (.pem file) to use. If you don't specify that flag (as in your first command) it will use your default ssh key (usually under ~/.ssh/).

So in your first command, you are actually asking scp to upload the .pem file itself using your default ssh key. I don't think that is what you want.

Try instead with:

scp -r -i /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs/keypairfile.pem uploads/* ec2-user@publicdns:/var/www/html/uploads