How to solve Permission denied (publickey) error when using Git?

Question

I\'m on Mac Snow Leopard and I just installed git.

I just tried

git clone git@thechaw.com:cakebook.git

but that gives

Answer 1

Visual guide (Windows)

1 of 2. Git batch side

1.1. Open git batch (Download her)

1.2. Paste the text below (Change to your GitHub account email)

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your_email@example.com"

1.3. Press Enter (Accepts the default file location)

1.4. Click Enter Twice (Or set SSH key passphrases - Gitbub passphrases docs)

> Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): [Type a passphrase]
> Enter same passphrase again: [Type passphrase again]

1.5. The key generate:

Your identification has been saved in /c/Users/user/.ssh/id_rsa...

1.6. Copy the SSH key to your clipboard.

$ clip < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

2 of 2. Github website user side

Under user setting Create key:

Paste the code from step 1.6

Done :)

---

If someone doesn't want to use SSH use HTTPS :

Github docs: https://docs.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/connecting-to-github-with-ssh

Answer 2

The github help link helped me sort out this problem. Looks like the ssh key was not added to the ssh-agent. This is what i ended up doing.

Command 1:

Ensure ssh-agent is enabled. The command starts the ssh-agent in the background:

eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"

Command 2:

Add your SSH key to the ssh-agent:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Answer 3

If you have more than one key you may need to do ssh-add private-keyfile

Answer 4

Got same error report.

Fixed with using HTTP instead. Since I don't want set "SSH keys" for a test PC.

Change URL to HTTP when clone:

git clone https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git

My problem is a little bit different: I have URL set when adding a existing local repo to remote, by using:

git remote add origin ssh://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git

To fix it, reset URL to HTTP:

git remote set-url origin https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git

BTW, you may check your URL using command:

git remote -v
origin  https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git (fetch)
origin  https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git (push)

Hope this will help some one like me. :D

Answer 5

I met the same issue because of I was thought the difference between SSH and HTTPS is

https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git

ssh://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git

So I changed from HTTPS to SSH just by changing https:// to ssh:// nothing on the end of the url was changed.

But the truth is:

https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git

git@github.com:USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git

Which means I changed ssh://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git to git@github.com:USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git it works.

Stupid error but hope helps someone!

Answer 6

I was getting the same error. My problem was mixing in sudo.

I couldn't create the directory I was cloning into automatically without prefixing the git clone command with sudo. When I did that, however, my ssh keys where not being properly referenced.

To fix it, I set permissions via chmod on the parent directory I wanted to contain my clone so I could write to it. Then I ran git clone WITHOUT a sudo prefix. It then worked! I changed the permissions back after that. Done.