How to clone git repo with SSH key

Introduction

In initial days when GitHub was allowing https​ based URL clone, and committing code with https​ with user authentication, we were using the command like: git clone https://repo_url​. It still works, but once you clone the code and try to commit, it fails.

I decided to clone with ssh​  and what are the steps I taken to clone the repository with ssh​. Post clone what i did to permanent add the .pem​ file in git config.

Let's start from generating a private key first to add in the GitHub account. 

1. Create a private key file.

Note: For windows users, you need PuTTy installed on your system, or you can use git bash​  if git is installed.

Open the terminal PuTTy or git bash or linux terminal, and run the given command:

​ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "[email protected]"

You may use different algorithms on your choice.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096
ssh-keygen -t dsa 
ssh-keygen -t ecdsa -b 521
ssh-keygen -t ed25519

The next step will ask you for key password, location of saving the key file.

This will generate 2 files, private (key/pem) and public (.pub). till now all good. Now we have to look for the .pub​  file content, which is basically the public key, which will further in GitHub.

Navigate to settings, marked in yellow. And go to SSH and GPG key section as:

Click in New SSK key, marked in yellow, and paste the contents of the .pub​ file in the next open forms, followed by key name.

2. Clone repository with SSH key.

There's a lot of resources available for this, just for an example you may refer:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4565700/how-to-specify-the-private-ssh-key-to-use-when-executing-shell-command-on-git

Why I need to go through all this. If you willing to get help from #chatGPI or any other tools, these tools have their own logics, how they are trained, not all time correct.

Let's see the command used for cloning repository with ssh​.

sudo git -c core.sshCommand="ssh -i private_key_path/privatekey" clone git@repository-url.git

This above command will clone the repository in some folder. go to the cloned folder and run git status or sudo git status​

This will give you message like:

On branch main

Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean

But when you will try to git pull, it will not work giving error below, as your ssh key file is not set properly.

[email protected]: Permission denied (publickey).

fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights

and the repository exists.

3. Setting private key path in .git/config​file

Go to cloned project directory and follow next command.

Use the command like:

git config --global core.sshCommand "ssh -i /home/user/.ssh/github-key"

or

git config --local core.sshCommand "ssh -i /home/user/.ssh/github-key"

---local = Local in specific folder.

---global = Global git setting on system.

Now you will be able to run git pull​, git push​  everything. This solution is 100% working and tested multiple times on different OS.

Hope you find this helpful!!