Heroku 'Permission denied (publickey) fatal: C

Question

I've searched around for many hours on end looking to a solution to my seemingly easy-to-fix problem. It's not that my search turned up nothing, it's that my search turned up so many different solutions -none of which have worked.

Anyways, I am simply unable to push, pull, or fetch from my Heroku repository from my Mac. Every attempt gives me (as if it's mocking me) the following error:

'Permission denied (publickey). fatal: Could not read from remote repository.'

I've tried (and re-tried) to fix it in many different ways. As I've said, I've spent a good chunk of the last two days searching around for an answer. Here are some of the things I've tried:

• heroku keys:clear followed by heroku keys:add
• Regenerating an ssh key on my own with 'ssh-keygen -t rsa'
• Clearing out my .ssh directory, followed by heroku keys:clear, followed by generating an ssh key
• Deleting my app on heroku and recreating one (fortunately not much was on there)

I can fetch from my GitHub repository fine, so I know it's not network connectivity (pinging heroku also works).

As a makeshift solution (that I hope doesn't turn into a permanent one), I've logged in to my Ubuntu Amazon AWS ec2 instance. Pulling and pushing to and from Heroku works perfectly. For this reason, I still feel as if the problem lies with the ssh key on my Mac. Both keys show up under my Heroku account. Does the email address at the end of the key matter?

EDIT: I can push and pull from GitHub fine (I'm not using ssh, however), so why not Heroku?

At this point I'm willing to try anything. Thanks!

Answer 1

I had the exact same error (on windows 7) and the cause was different. I solved it in a different way so I thought I'd add the cause and solution here for others.

Even though the error seemed to point to heroku really the error was saying "Heroku can't get to the git repository". I swore I had the same keys on all the servers because I created it and uploaded it to one after the other at the same time.

After spending almost a day on this I realized that because git was only showing me the fingerprint and not the actual key. I couldn't verify that it's key matched the one on my HD or heroku. I looked in the known hosts file and guess what... it shows the keys for each server and I was able to clearly see that the git and heroku public keys did not match.

1) I deleted all the files in my key folder, the key from github using their website, and the key from heroku using git bash and the command heroku keys:clear

2) Followed github's instructions here to generate a new key pair and upload the public key to git

3) using git bash- heroku keys:add to upload the same key to heroku.

Now git push heroku master works.

what a nightmare, hope this helped somebody.

Bryan

Answer 2

I know this has already been answered. But I would like to add my solution as it may helpful for others in the future..

A common key error is: Permission denied (publickey). You can fix this by using keys:add to notify Heroku of your new key.

In short follow these steps: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/keys

First you have to create a key if you don't have one:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Second you have to add the key to Heroku:

heroku keys:add

Answer 3

you need to create a new ssh key by typing the following - ssh-keygen -t rsa

Then you need to add: - heroku keys:add

Then if you type - heroku open

The problem has been solved.

It worked for me anyway, you could give it a try...

Answer 4

I got the same error, and because I have 4 ssh-keys, so I tried follow:

ssh-keygen -t rsa
heroku keys:add

then, four options show:

1) github_rsa.pub
2) id_boot2docker.pub
3) id_rsa.pub
4) sshkey.pub

I choose 3), the newest one

Then, I fix the error.

Answer 5

The problem I was having is that I was only using https for my GitHub account. I needed to make sure that my GitHub account was setup for ssh access and that GitHub and heroku were both using the same public keys. These are the steps I took:

1. Navigate to the ~/.ssh directory and delete the id_rsa and id_rsa.pub if they are there. I started with new keys, though it might not be necessary.

   $ cd ~/.ssh
   $ rm id_rsa id_rsa.pub
   

2. Follow the steps on gitHub to generate ssh keys

3. Login to heroku, create a new site and add your public keys:

   $ heroku login
   ...
   $ heroku create
   $ heroku keys:add
   $ git push heroku master
   

Answer 6

i had the same case on linux ubuntu and just fixed it, it seems that OS was confused between the /root/.ssh/ and home/user/.ssh/ dir, what i did was:

1. removed all keys from root and home/user .shh directory.
2. generated a new key make sure to pay attention to the path of creation (/home/you/.ssh/id_rsa) or (/root/.ssh/id_rsa)
3. check heroku keys heroku keys
4. if keys in there clear heroku keys:clear
5. heroku keys:add now in here if heroku couldn't find a key and asked to generate one right no, and this mean you have the same issue as mine, do the add command like this heroku keys:add /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub the path that you'll add will be the one that you got in step 2.
6. try git push heroku master now