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

Question

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.

Answer 1

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