Getting “Permission denied (publickey)” when tryhing to clone from Git repo

Question

I'm trying to install immortal from source on my machine. However, whenever I run git clone (as in in the instructions), I receive the following error message:

myuser@mysite:~$ git clone git@github.com:immortal/immortal.git $HOME/go/src/github.com/immortal/immortal
Cloning into '/home/myuser/go/src/github.com/immortal/immortal'...
Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

Does anyone know what this means and how to solve it?

Answer 1

This means the remote server (GitHub) can't verify your SSH identity because your public key is not accepted.

If this isn't a private repo and you have no plans to commit back to this repository in the near future, you should just use HTTP connections. These don't require SSH keys and can be done by anyone:

git clone https://github.com/immortal/immortal.git

If, however, this is a private repository or you want to contribute code, you're going to have to add your SSH key to your GitHub account and then try again.