git push heroku master Permission denied (publickey). fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Please excuse a bit of frustration, which I will try to keep in check since Heroku is using SO as their customer support (which I think it shoddy to say the least).

For the last five hours I have been trying to get an application to publish, but invariably something goes wrong with the keys. I've read dozens of articles and tried tip after tip in an effort to figure out where, in the stupid, completely opaque process Heroku is screwing up.

My use case is not that difficult: I have created a new keypair for my heroku apps. I have set that key to be my key:

  > heroku keys
  === travis@xxxx.com Keys
  ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC...avOqfA7ZBd travis@xxxx.com

I can log in and "create" an application (stupid name, since it seems to be creating a git repo, not any sort of app) without problem. But every freaking time I try to push my app, I get:

  > git push heroku master
  Permission denied (publickey).
  fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

I have no insight into WTF is going on with it; I'm just stuck banging my head against a keyboard with no recourse but to hope the almighty god of Google can answer it. And google isn't answering it (well, let me take that back, I've seen about a dozen ways to answer this).

For a system that is supposed to be easy, this is a joke. I like the idea of Heroku, but after taking five our to get absolutely nothing done, I'm thinking maybe it is the wrong choice.

There are a variety of solutions around the web. I will try to condense the available options into one post. Please try your connection again after every step.

• Step 1: Attempt adding you public key to Heroku

   heroku keys:add ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub // or just heroku keys:add and it will prompt you to pick one of your keys
  

• Step 2: Generate a new set of SSH keys, then attempt the first step again

  https://help.github.com/articles/generating-ssh-keys
  

• Step 3: Verify and/or modify your config file

   vim ~/.ssh/config
  
   Host heroku.com
   Hostname heroku.com 
   Port 22 
   IdentitiesOnly yes 
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa    <--- Should be your public SSH key
   TCPKeepAlive yes 
   User jsmith@gmail.com
  

• Step 4: Remove the heroku remote from git, the recreate the connection, adding the remote via heroku create will only be an option for new repositories. Be sure to delete your old repo that you originally attempted to create

    $ git remote rm heroku
    $ heroku create
  

• Step 5: Reinstall Heroku Toolkit

Your heroku key and github keys are not in sync.

• Determine which key you want to use (recommend creating a new one ie heroku_rsa).

• Add the key to github.

• Add the same key to heroku using: heroku keys:add

I've encountered the same issue, and this is my theory as to what's going on:

I signed up for Heroku a long time ago, giving them my github public key. When attempting the usual git push heroku master, it goes and looks for my private key, found at ~/.ssh/github_rsa. It then fails silently with the message you posted.

However, I tried later to ssh into another server using the -i flag to specify my "identity file" (i.e. private key), and it prompted me for the password to my private key. Having "unlocked" the private key, the git push heroku master command works. Some conclusions:

• While ssh will prompt you for the password to an identity file, git will not.
• If you unlock the identity file with another method, like ssh, it will stay unlocked for your git usage.
• There doesn't seem to be any documentation on how to permanently remove the password protection on an identity file, including with the common unix command keytool.
• Above solutions of creating a new public/private key pair seem to be a workaround for this password issue, without knowing that's the problem.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4269922/permission-denied-publickey-when-deploying-heroku-code-fatal-the-remote-end

I think this might have your solution, it did for me at least

With me, it seemed the problem was that I had ssh-agent running in the background, and the relevant private key had not been added to it.

ps -afe | grep ssh-agent

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa_heroku_github

I also had to add the public key to github (manually) and heroku

heroku keys:add ~/.ssh/id_rsa_heroku_github.pub

If none of the other solutions work for you, be sure that you are logged in linux shell with your account and not with root account.

That way, if you are running with the user that is not the owner of your ssh keys, git will look for the wrong keys to authenticate