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

Had a similar issue, and tried lots of things. Ultimately what worked for me, was to have Gnu on Windows installed (https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/releases) , and ensure that it was using the ssh tool inside that directory and not the one with Git. Once installed test with (ensure if its in your environment PATH that it preceds Git\bin)

C:\Git\htest2>which ssh
C:\Program Files (x86)\Gow\bin\ssh.BAT

I used putty and pageant as described here:http://rubyonrailswin.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/getting-git-to-work-on-heroku-on-windows-using-putty-plink-pageant/

Once the keys had been sent to heroku (heroku keys:add c:\Users\Person.ssh\id_rsa.pub), use

ssh -v <username>@heroku.com 

and ensure that your stack is showing use of Putty - ie a working stack:

Looking up host "heroku.com"
Connecting to 50.19.85.132 port 22
Server version: SSH-2.0-Twisted
Using SSH protocol version 2
**We claim version: SSH-2.0-PuTTY_Release_0.62**
Using Diffie-Hellman with standard group "group1"
Doing Diffie-Hellman key exchange with hash SHA-1
Host key fingerprint is:
ssh-rsa 2048 8b:48:5e:67:0e:c9:16:47:32:f2:87:0c:1f:c8:60:ad
Initialised AES-256 SDCTR client->server encryption
Initialised HMAC-SHA1 client->server MAC algorithm
Initialised AES-256 SDCTR server->client encryption
Initialised HMAC-SHA1 server->client MAC algorithm
Pageant is running. Requesting keys.
Pageant has 1 SSH-2 keys
Using username "*--ommitted for security--*".
**Trying Pageant key #0**
Authenticating with public key "rsa-key-20140401" from agent
Sending Pageant's response
Access granted
Opened channel for session
Server refused to allocate pty
Server refused to start a shell/command
FATAL ERROR: Server refused to start a shell/command

One that was running previously and failed:

C:\Git\htest2>ssh -v <username>@[e-mail]
OpenSSH_4.6p1, OpenSSL 0.9.8e 23 Feb 2007
debug1: Connecting to heroku.com [50.19.85.156] port 22.
debug1: Connection established.
debug1: identity file /c/Users/Person/.ssh/identity type -1
debug1: identity file /c/Users/Person/.ssh/id_rsa type 1
debug1: identity file /c/Users/Person/.ssh/id_dsa type -1
debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version Twisted
debug1: no match: Twisted
debug1: Enabling compatibility mode for protocol 2.0
**debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_4.6**
debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent
debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT received
debug1: kex: server->client aes128-cbc hmac-md5 none
debug1: kex: client->server aes128-cbc hmac-md5 none
debug1: sending SSH2_MSG_KEXDH_INIT
debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEXDH_REPLY
debug1: Host 'heroku.com' is known and matches the RSA host key.
debug1: Found key in /c/Users/Person/.ssh/known_hosts:1
debug1: ssh_rsa_verify: signature correct
debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS sent
debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS
debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS received
debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_REQUEST sent
debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_ACCEPT received
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
debug1: Next authentication method: publickey
debug1: Trying private key: /c/Users/Person/.ssh/identity
debug1: Offering public key: /c/Users/Person/.ssh/id_rsa
debug1: Server accepts key: pkalg ssh-rsa blen 277
debug1: Trying private key: /c/Users/Person/.ssh/id_dsa
debug1: No more authentication methods to try.
Permission denied (publickey).

Answer 2

I'd like to add another solution since I didn't see it here. My problem was that heroku was linking to the wrong url (since I kept playing around with url names). Editing the remote url solved my problem:

git remote set-url heroku <heroku-url-here>