Why can I use my RSA keys with the Git Bash app but not with Ubuntu WSL on my Windows machine?

Question

I needed to clone a repo from Gitea and I normally do it on my Mac but I don't have my Mac with me. I was able to clone the repo on Windows after placing the RSA key in the .ssh folder that's in C\Users\me while using Git Bash for Windows, but I could not do it with WSL. I then tried copying the files in the C\Users\me.ssh and placing them in the Linux file system's .ssh folder. Did not work. I tried deleting WSL .ssh folder and making it a symlink to the C\Users\me.ssh one, and still didn't work. How can I fix this?

Answer 1

I suppose it is permissions issue. The SSH keys are private data. In Ubuntu/Linux they must have restrictive permissions, so only the owner user can read them. You can set the proper permission by the following commands:

sudo chown -R "$USER:$USER" ~/.ssh # make sure the files are owned by the user
find ~/.ssh -type d -exec chmod 700 {} \; # set drwx------ permissions for the dirs
find ~/.ssh -type f -exec chmod 600 {} \; # set -rw------- permissions for the files

• note, ~/ represents the user's $HOME directory, i.e. /home/<user>/.

Another possible trouble maker is the way you've created the files. In Windows, lines end with both the line feed and carriage return ASCII characters, but Unix uses only a line feed. In such case you can process the ssh key files by dos2unix or you can use some of the other approaches, shown here.

See also:

• How do I setup SSH key based authentication for GitHub by using ~/.ssh/config file?