SmartGit won't authenticate with ssh

Question

I have a webserver with gitolite installed and where i login using my ssh key. Normally i just use git on the server itself using the command line but for a new project i need to clone a repo on my windows pc and i would like to use SmartGit for this.

But i've spend several hours already just to clone the repo via Smartgit. As remote Git i use the url i normally would use on the server: me@my-server:the-repo then after a while i get a dialogue box 'SSH Authentication' and i select my private key, as i would do for pagent, and put in my Passphrase. But when i click login it just tries to connect for a while and then shows me the 'SSH Authentication' dialogue box again. No error message or anything.

I tried the clone the repo with the same data via command line and that works just fine. So is there something i'm missing?

Answer 1

Needed to save my ssh private key as an OpenSSH key in PuTTYgen because SmartGit only understand that format.

Answer 2

Yes, that's it!

I just want to go in details to help the ones starting from scratch:

on windows you can do the following procedure:

1. Install msysgit from Here
2. To generate public/private key pair as needed by many git servers (like Assembla) use PuTTYgen that you find here: click on Generate and move your mouse until it tells you that the key is generated. Optionally, enter a passphrase to protect your private key
3. Save or copy the public key at your need
4. Save private key to use with SmartGit using menu voice Conversions/Export OpenSSH key
5. Use the last file to authenticate in SmartGit