SSH error on push to an existing project Permission denied (publickey)

Question

Made all necessary steps to use the GitLab, these settings are:

1. Created a rsa as described in this link
2. Copied the code generated in {my key}.pub and added this code in GitLab
3. In my existent repository added to url with command git remote add gitlab [email protected]:ridermansb/breezenhibernateproblem.git
4. I tried to make the push git push -u gitlab master

My .ssh/config

Host gitlab.com
  HostName gitlab.com
  IdentityFile C:\Users\Riderman\.ssh\gitlab_rsa
  IdentitiesOnly yes

Error below:

Warning: Permanently added 'gitlab.com,54.243.197.170' (RSA) to the list of known hosts. Permission denied (publickey). fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights and the repository exists.

I made a video showing all the steps: http://www.screenr.com/euVH

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

After seeing your screencast, I see that you don't have a %HOME%\.ssh\config file.

This is important because:

• by default, ssh will look for the public/private key in %HOME%\.ssh\id_rsa(.pub)
• With an scp-like syntax ([email protected]:yourRepo, with the ':' as separator), ssh could look in a .ssh/config file for the location of the actual public/private key, using gitlab.com as an entry in said config file.

Add %HOME%\.ssh\config with:

Host gitlab.com
  HostName gitlab.com
  IdentityFile C:\path\to\.ssh\gitlab_rsa
  IdentitiesOnly yes

and your git push -u gitlab master will work.

It turned out it was also about setting HOME correctly:

%HOME% was not correct.
I configured the variable %HOME% to point to %USERPROFILE% locally and it worked

Mysygit does set HOME, but if you are using git outside of a git-cmd session, then it is your responsibility to set HOME correctly.