Troubleshooting

Terminal prompts for SSH passphrase instead of GNOME Keyring

1. Make sure public key filenames are correct

   Note: Public key filenames should be equal to the private key filename plus a .pub extension, otherwise they won’t be picked up by ssh-agent upon login.

    $ ls -1 ~/.ssh/*.pub
    google_compute_engine.pub
    id_rsa.github.pub
    id_rsa.pub
   

2. Ensure files and folders have proper permissions

   1. Make sure the .ssh folder has proper permissions

       chmod 700 ~/.ssh
      

   2. Make sure each private key has proper permissions

       chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_rsa
      

      (Do the same for any other private SSH keys in ~/.ssh)

   3. Make sure each private key has proper permissions

       chmod 644 ~/.ssh/*.pub
      

3. Set up ~/.ssh/config so the correct private key will be used for a particular host

    Host github.com
        IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa.github
   

4. Log out and log back in

5. All keys in ~/.ssh should be automatically picked up and added to ssh-agent

   Verify using ssh-add -l or ssh-add -L