Git error: “Host Key Verification Failed” when connecting to remote repository

Question

I am trying to connect to a remote Git repository that resides on my web server and clone it to my machine.

I am using the following format for my command:

Answer 1

If you are using git for Windows.

• Open the git GUI.
• Open the local git repository in git GUI.
• Add the remote or push if the remote already exists.
• Answer "yes" to the question about whether you want to continue.

The GUI client adds the key for you to ~/.ssh/known_hosts. This is easier to remember if you don't do it often and also avoids the need to use the git command line (the standard Windows command lines don't have the ssh-keyscan executable.

Answer 2

The solutions mentioned here are great, the only missing point is, what if your public and private key file names are different than the default ones?

Create a file called "config" under ~/.ssh and add the following contents

Host github.com
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github_id_rsa

Replace github_id_rsa with your private key file.

Answer 3

This is happening because github is not currently in your known hosts.

You should be prompted to add github to your known hosts. If this hasn't happened, you can run ssh -T git@github.com to receive the prompt again.

Answer 4

What worked for me was to first add my SSH key of the new computer, I followed these instructions from GitLab - add SSH key. Note that since I'm on Win10, I had to do all these commands in Git Bash on Windows (it didn't work in regular DOS cmd Shell).

Then again in Git Bash, I had to do a git clone of the repo that I had problems with, and in my case I had to clone it to a different name since I already had it locally and didn't want to lose my commits. For example

git clone ssh://git@gitServerUrl/myRepo.git myRepo2

Then I got the prompt to add it to known hosts list, the question might be this one:

Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

I typed "yes" and it finally worked, you should typically get a message similar to this:

Warning: Permanently added '[your repo link]' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.

Note: if you are on Windows, make sure that you use Git Bash for all the commands, this did not work in regular cmd shell or powershell, I really had to do this in Git Bash.

Lastly I deleted the second clone repo (myRepo2 in the example) and went back to my first repo and I could finally do all the Git stuff like normal in my favorite editor VSCode.

Answer 5

I got the same problem on a newly installed system, but this was a udev problem. There was no /dev/tty node, so I had to do:

mknod -m 666 /dev/tty c 5 0

Answer 6

I had the similar issue, unfortunately I used the GitExtensions HMI and forgot that I wrote a passphrase. With HMI.... forget it ! Do not enter passphrase when you generate your key !