I recently reinstalled my laptop and found that 'git clone' wasn't working. I was consistently receiving Permission denied (publickey). errors.
The fix is documented on GitHub's SSH issues page: use ssh-add to tell SSH about the key I want to use to authenticate on GitHub.
My question is: under the hood, what does ssh-add actually do?
I've been meaning to expand my understanding of SSH for a while, & this seems like a good excuse to start :-)
2 Answers
ssh-add adds private key identities (from your ~/.ssh directory) to the authentication agent (ssh-agent), so that the ssh agent can take care of the authentication for you, and you don’t have type in passwords at the terminal.
Based on this article in github, sometime on some linux distributions even after you set up everything properly this error shows up:
Agent admitted failure to sign using the key.
debug1: No more authentication methods to try.
Permission denied (publickey).And you should run ssh-add to solve the issue.
