SSH Key Keeps Asking for Password on Gitlab

Question

I have been debugging the issue for an hour or two now.

I am currently using Gitlab and Mac OS X 10.9.2.

Today, I was trying to git pull origin master from our master branch so I can get the latest version to develop on. I have always used these configurations, and don't recall changing anything. This configuration has always worked, and never prompted me for a password. Today, I got this error:

My-MacBook-Pro:branch_name loop$ git pull origin master

git@domain's password:

Here are my ~/.ssh/permissions:

My-MacBook-Pro:.ssh loop$ ls -l

total 24

-rw-------  1 loop  staff  1766 Oct 31  2013 github_rsa

-rw-r--r--  1 loop  staff   403 Oct 31  2013 github_rsa.pub

-rw-r--r--  1 loop  staff  2408 Sep 15 15:08 known_hosts

I have tried various things:

1. restarting com.openssh.sshd

2. restarting org.openbsd.ssh-agent

3. I made sure that my public key on Gitlab is the same as my github_rsa.pub, and it indeed was the same.

4. I have uncommented sshd_config's to PasswordAuthentication no

5. Checked /var/log/authd.log for errors relating to SSH, but nothing relevant.

What could be the issue?

Answer 1

Rename the file github_rsa to id_rsa.

SSH looks for the private key by "name" id_rsa in .ssh folder of your home.

Its not able to find it now because you have renamed it.

PS: Whenever you encounter a problem in SSH try running it with option -vvv so that you get a verbose output!

Hope this solves the problem!

Happy Gitting!

Answer 2

Fixed this by generating a new public/private key just for Gitlab with no password.

Create a new SSH key:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "[email protected]"

Note: For this scenario, when it prompted me to enter a password, I left it blank, since this key is simply for internal use.

Dump the contents:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Finally, copy the contents to add to Gitlab.