Why doesn't my SSH key work for connecting to github?

Question

Note: I\'m not a newb, and I\'ve done this a gazillion times, but for some reason today it decided not to work.

I keep getting the Permission denied (publickey).

Answer 1

For ssh you need to change the url. Open up the git config file and change the url to

url = git@github.com:username/repository.git

Answer 2

I was getting some weird line ending issue in Windows when copying the clone address from github.

Note the extra character before git. It was NOT appearing in my console. It was invisible.

git clone git@github.com:user/repo.git ./docker
Cloning into './docker'...
Warning: Permanently added the RSA host key for IP address '140.82.XXX.X' to the list of known hosts.
\302\226git@github.com: Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

It took me a while to notice the \302\226 before git in the response. Once I saw that, I backspaced before git@ and made sure there was just a space there and it worked.

Answer 3

After creating a config file (~/.ssh/config) it worked. This is what I had to put in it:

Host github.com
User git
Port 22
Hostname github.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
TCPKeepAlive yes
IdentitiesOnly yes

Thanks to @VonC for leading me to there in the comments.

I don't get why I never needed this before though.